


Wade In Your Water

by especiallythezefronposter



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 1980s, Betrayal, Cabins, Cliffhangers, College, Europe, Falling In Love, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Lies, M/M, Medical Procedures, Mind Control, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Multiple Personalities, Non-Consensual Drug Use, On the Run, Past Torture, Permanent Injury, Post-Hulk, Spies & Secret Agents, Suicidal Thoughts, Violence, Winter Soldier Tony Stark
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-05-18 13:42:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 49,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19335682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/especiallythezefronposter/pseuds/especiallythezefronposter
Summary: In 1984, Bruce Banner is reported killed in action after a bomb test gone wrong. A month later, he returns to Caltech university to finish up his thesis.The Winter Soldier is sent to bring him in.





	1. The Dorm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So basically years and years ago I saw this incredible artwork in which Tony is the Winter Soldier, which immediately inspired me to write a ws!Tony story. Nothing happened with it for a long time, but then this precious story came about. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> (Go look at the beautiful artwork first, though, and check out all of petiteallemande's work while you're at it. They make so, so many beautiful things: petiteallemande.tumblr.com/post/150226084342/winter-soldier-tony-digital-painting)

The Soldier always wears the finest clothes: tailored suits, cufflinks that go unnoticed by most but cost a small fortune, a watch of which only five models exist on earth, Italian leather shoes and gloves made to fit his hands exactly. He is the picture of wealth, success, beauty: the perfect lure. Men and women alike fall for his charms. Either they’re drawn in by his gentle hands, his soft cheeks, the shyness when he looks at them, or they’re intrigued by his cold eyes, the undeniable command in his quiet voice, the rigidity of his shoulders. The Soldier can be whoever is needed to draw the target in, whoever his target wants to see. A straight man will see his full lips, his big eyes, the feminine cant to his hips. Some will say he looks submissive, some dominant, the worst people are going to say he looks small, boyish, innocent and ready to be ruined.

The Soldier does not care. He is not anything, but he can be everything. He can lie back and bare his throat or hold down and humiliate, he can smile innocently and act surprised when someone reaches between his legs. He isn’t anything. There are only targets, handlers and civilians. He is none of the three. He is like a weapon, a gun. A gun is nothing. It just waits until someone is ready to point and shoot, and then it waits again.

The Soldier does a lot of waiting. He does not always remember, but he knows the waiting happens. Sometimes it happens while he is there, on a mission or in a facility, sometimes while he is gone, put on ice for a year until they need him again. Now, he is sitting in a facility, still in a medical gown instead of a suit, but there is a calendar that indicates it is April, 1984. He knows, although he does not remember, that he has read calendars before, with years like 1967 and 1971 printed neatly in the righthand corner.

His assignment is explained to him. He is fitted a shirt and a jacket, more casual than usual, as the assignment requires. Next they let him choose a watch. This is the only choice he has ever made. This time he selects the one with the golden face and the brown strap. Someone helps him put the stiff fingers of his left hand into a glove, then helps him put on the other one as well. His hair is combed and modelled, his shoes are put on, tied and shined one last time. Someone pinches his lips, then his cheeks, to get some colour into them. He is adjusted and ordered around until his handler is satisfied. Lastly, he is made to repeat his assignment and all its details back to his handler, in Russian, then in English, his American accent indistinguishable from that of any real boy who grew up on the West Coast. Then he is taken to transport, ready to start his assignment.

He is brought to a plane, boards it, waits. Once they land, he waits again, this time for transport to his next location. Eventually someone turns up who takes him to an office building. He is in Washington DC. Traffic is jammed, so again, he waits.

The office building is unimpressive, so are the people in it. A woman who smiles a lot guides him to a lift, in which he waits until it reaches the top floor. There, he waits to be let into an office. Once someone inside tells them to enter, he does.

A woman is leaning against a desk, unfriendly smile on her face. She does not look up when the Soldier and the smiling woman enter, she keeps looking at the man standing in front of her, trying to intimidate her by standing taller than she does. He has a moustache like Stalin’s. Both the man and the woman look like the kind of people who’d want the Soldier to be quiet in bed, to cower and squirm yet follow every order. The only difference is that the woman would want to pleasure him until he can’t take it anymore. The man just wants him to hurt.

The man’s name is General Thaddeus Ross, part of the Banner investigation because of Banner’s ties to the military. He’s been married for twenty seven years and treats his wife respectfully, although any love they might have had for each other is long gone. He only cheats on her a couple of times a year, always with prostitutes. Despite how much he pays them, the ones he’s already been with once refuse to take him as a client for a second time.

The woman is named Judith Gilligan, she’s FBI, too high up in the hierarchy to be bothering with specific cases like these, but it’s a strange case, one that has a lot of people’s attention, even hers, apparently. She has been married three times, each time for less than five years. Her sexual tastes aren’t confined to any gender, but her interests seem to go strictly to younger people, always legal, but never over twenty five, preferably cocky ones that leave her hotel room with shaking knees and tear tracks down their cheeks. She never lets them stay the night.

For a moment there is just silence. The Soldier waits.

‘You can monitor him through us,’ Gilligan says. ‘Hourly updates. I’ll make them thorough.’

Another silence. ‘As soon as he turns, the case is out of your hands.’

Gilligan smiles. ‘Agreed.’

‘Ma’am, General, this is Mr. Collins, as you requested.’

‘Look at that,’ Gilligan says under her breath, not hiding the way she checks him out. Then to the smiling lady,  
‘Thank you, Erin.’ The smiling lady nods and leaves. He thinks Gilligan likes her so much because Erin refuses to sleep with her. Then she turns back to the Soldier. ‘Welcome, Mr. Collins. I hope you’ve been briefed?’

‘Of course, ma’am,’ he says, American accent perfect. ‘Ready when you are.’

Ross is checking him out, too, pupils blown despite his attempts to seem disinterested. He looks away briskly. ‘We should put him in something else. Banner’s not gonna fall for someone so polished.’

Gilligan is still smiling, something mean to it. ‘Do you not think of your daughter as polished, General?’

‘I’m saying he doesn’t look believable. We need someone who looks real to Banner.’ He’s quiet for a moment. ‘You know what? Banner is an abuse victim. That’s gonna be a way faster way to gain his trust than the whole TA thing.’

‘Of course,’ the Soldier says. He sees it coming when the General backhands him across the face. He can take much worse treatment without flinching, but right now, he is Howard Collins and he is surprised, slightly scared but trying to hide it. He steps back, gasps, reaches for his cheek. Then he drops his hand and steps forward again, as if steeling himself for another blow, not quite ready but trying to look brave anyway. His cheek throbs and the General’s class ring is smeared with blood. He hits him again in the same place, now with his fist, then right after that in the stomach, unguarded after Howard Collins raises his hands to his face. The General takes his wrist into a bruising grip and knees him in the stomach another time. The Soldier winces and groans appropriately, letting fear into his eyes and tensing and relaxing his muscles, as if he’s scared but trying to prepare himself for the next blow.

Gilligan is watching, almost smiling. ‘That’s alright, Ross,’ she says, although it’s clear the General was already done. She just likes to have the last word.

Howard Collins keeps his eyes on the floor, ashamed he is unable to take a beating, weary of another blow.

Gilligan takes his suitcase from him, opens it up on the desk. It has different types of clothes for different occasions. She picks out the most casual ones and stuffs them into a backpack that was also in the suitcase, throwing in a couple of more valuable-looking pieces. She takes the watch from the Soldier’s wrist and puts it in the bag, too, then takes it out again and wraps it in a pair of socks. Then she hands the Soldier another pile of clothes. He takes them from her, shakes them out, crumples them in his hands, then takes off his clothes and puts the new ones on. Jeans and a button-down, muted blues and greys. Both Ross and Gilligan watch him undress. Gilligan watches his muscled arms, his hipbones jutting out, Ross mostly watches the mass of scars at the centre of his chest.

They’re fake, although very well-made. Underneath are real scars that look almost exactly the same, and a miniature arc reactor that is the Red Room’s best kept secret. He keeps his gloves on. The wires running from the arc reactor down his arm to his hand are covered up well, but the wires in his palms and fingers and the repulsor they power are not.

Gilligan turns back to the suitcase and picks up a shirt. ‘All these have wires in them?’ She already knows the answer to this question. She has already been briefed on how to access the wire’s frequency two days ago.

‘Yes.’

She tears the shirt down the seam with her bare hands and studies the thin wires that are bared in the process.

She looks up at Howard momentarily. ‘Russian make?’ She knows this, too. It was all in the briefing.

‘Yes.’

‘How the fuck does Anvil get its hands on Russian tech?’

Anvil takes money from Soviet organisations such as the Red Room, employing their spies on US soil as long as the pay is good enough. This, Gilligan does not know. ‘They don’t have to worry about politics the way the army and the FBI do.’

‘Fair enough,’ she says, still picking at the wires.

‘What’s wrong with your left hand?’, Ross asks, noticing the stiffness of it underneath the glove, how the Soldier only really uses the thumb and forefinger, and only sparingly.

‘The fingers were crushed on a mission. Extraction only happened a couple of weeks later. By then the damage had been done,’ he says, wincing as if he’s remembering the pain. This is not how his hand was damaged. He does not remember what happened to it. For all he knows, he has always had the metal stuck under his skin.

When he is tying his shoes, a battered pair of sneakers, slowly and clumsily because it’s something he can’t do with just his right hand, Gilligan asks, ‘So what are you doing at Caltech, Anthony.’

His story had been planned out for him – Anthony Stark, TA for Bruce’s Biochemistry lab -, but now he changes it appropriately. ‘I’m an undergrad. I don’t normally live at the dorms, but this is a temporary solution until –‘ He chuckles nervously, more of a breath than anything else. ‘Until my boyfriend wants to let me into his apartment again.’ He finishes tying his shoes and rises.

Gilligan and Ross are exchanging a look. ‘Banner’s a queer, He has known affiliations with several queer activists.’ Ross tells her eventually, admitting that he’s left at least that small bit of information out of the official military files on Banner. The Soldier knows there is more. ‘He’s only going to feel more protective of a homosexual.’

Gilligan nods slowly, then looks back at the Soldier. ‘How come I’ve never seen you around campus?’

‘I – um –‘ he does that nervous chuckle again, drags his right hand through his hair, bringing it down to his side again slow enough that Gilligan can see that it’s shaking. ‘I’m not always able to go to class because I… I just spend a lot of time with my boyfriend, I guess. Lose track of time. He can get kind of jealous, sometimes, when I’m not with him as much.’ He doesn’t make eye contact, bites his lip, one hand going to cover his belly, in the place where the bruises from Ross’s kicks are still forming.

‘Very well,’ Ross says, while Gilligan scribbles her office phone number down on a piece of paper. It’s a phone number he already has memorised, but he takes it anyway. 

‘There’s a cab downstairs to take you to the airport,’ Ross tells him. ‘Remember the objective: we need proof, just a confession might not be enough.’

‘A confession is more than enough, General. We already agreed that proof isn’t worth risking civilian lives.’

The Soldier simply nods without looking at either of them, making them both feel like he agrees with them. He leaves once he is dismissed. 

In the cab and in the airport and on the airplane, he waits. 

He hails another cab at the airport in California, no longer Howard Collins, special operative hired by the FBI through Anvil, but Anthony Stark, undergrad at Caltech, recently single after being kicked out by his abusive boyfriend.

The lady at the administration desk is taken aback by his bruised and busted cheek, but it makes her smile at him more kindly. She’s not old enough to have a kid his age, probably more of a middle schooler, so he makes his voice quiet, a little higher than usual, fidgets in a way kids sometimes do. As expected, she does not follow the protocols he prepared for, but simply hands him the key to his new dorm after filling out most of a form and glancing at his student ID, barely asking any questions.

The dorm has one bed, a desk, a dresser and a sink. It even has a window. It is much smaller than the average size of a bedroom in an American home, but not all that much smaller than a standard college dorm room. In the corner of the room is a spider. He is not scared of it, is not scared of anything, but knows that many people are.

The Soldier commences his mission. He goes to Bruce Banner’s door, at the opposite side of the hallway of his own door, two doors down. He knocks and after a minute, Banner opens the door.

‘Hey,’ he says, frowning slightly. He hasn’t opened the door completely, is leaning against it in a way that if he closes it, he can easily put all of his weight behind it, should someone try to push the door open against his will. He does not do it consciously, but it says a lot about how safe he really feels here.

‘Oh thank God!’, Anthony says. ‘Somehow everyone is actually attending class. I’ve knocked on like three doors already. There’s a spider in my room.’

‘Okay.’

Anthony’s breath stutters and he digs his fingers into his own arm. It catches Bruce’s eye right away, makes him look uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being really dumb, but I’m really scared of spiders and I was wondering if you could help me get it out. I don’t want to kill it – just. I’m not gonna be able to sleep if it’s there.’

‘Oh, sure,’ Bruce says. He’s wearing sweats and a dirty T-shirt, but despite it being a warm day, he goes back into his room to put on a hoodie before he follows Anthony to his dorm. It’s to cover up a scar running down his upper arm, almost all the way down to his elbow, presumably from the broken glass of a bottle, presumably inflicted by his father, presumably during his early childhood. The FBI file mentions Banner being taken from his home by Child Protective Services after one too many domestic disturbances, but the US Army file has details, pages and pages of medical records, even some sparse admissions by Banner himself.

Banner has to go get a cup from his own room because Tony doesn’t have any and uses that and the slip of paper Tony got at the administration desk to trap the spider in the cup and set it outside down the hall, through the door to the courtyard.

Anthony walks there and back with him. He makes sure to walk with a limp he seems to be trying to hide. It’s a kind of limp the Soldier is intimately familiar with, as he’s had it numerous times, one that comes from being fucked by someone who has no interest in being gentle. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I was starting to think I’d have to sleep out in the hall.’

‘You only moved in today, right?’, Banner asks. He’s suspicious, as he should be, about the timing. The accident with the gamma bomb happened last month, Banner has only resumed classes this week. Someone he’s never seen before moving in across the hall is no coincidence.

‘Yeah,’ Anthony says. ‘It’s temporary, I hope. I live off-campus with, um, with a friend, but he’s -‘ he lets out a nervous chuckle, subconsciously touching the bruise on his cheek. ‘We’re having a fight and he changed the fucking locks. It should only take a couple of days before he cools down, but I don’t know anyone here and that dorm thing was easier to arrange than I thought. I’m Anthony, by the way. But most people call me Tony.’

‘Bruce,’ Banner says. They stop in front of Tony’s door. Bruce hands him back the administration slip. He looks guilty, as if he feels bad for being suspicious of Tony, for assuming the entire universe revolves around him and everyone else isn’t dealing with their own problems.

‘Bruce Banner?’, Tony asks. This is off-script, but should Banner have any doubts left about Tony not being a real college student, some overly technical questions about Banner’s research could definitely help. ‘You wrote that paper on antielectron collisions, right?’ The Soldier is not sure if that little fact was even in his research, or if he knows it from somewhere else, maybe another mission. He has learned not to worry about this, not to question the source of his memories.

‘Oh, yeah I did.’

‘Would you mind if – okay, no, I’m sure you have better things to do. I’ll just go. Thank you so much for getting rid of the spider.’

Bruce frowns, but doesn’t stop him. ‘See you,’ he says distractedly. Then, ‘Wait. You’re leaving because you think I’m busy?’

Tony turns around, opening his mouth to say something, but nothing comes out.

‘I’m not. I’d like to talk about the essay with you.’

‘You really don’t mind? I know I can be annoying, I won’t take it personally if you say no.’

‘No. I really don’t mind.’

‘Oh.’ Tony is surprised, but smiles. ‘Great! You wanna meet me in the cafeteria tonight? I need to go buy some stuff right now.’ He laughs self-deprecatingly. ‘I don’t even have a toothbrush.’

‘Of course. At eight?’

‘Okay. I’ll be there.’

Until then, the Soldier waits. He does have a toothbrush. In fact, he has much more stuff than he usually does at a facility in between a mission and cryo. Tony takes all of the clothes out of his backpack and folds them neatly now that he has the time. Then the Soldier sets an alarm for seven fifty, injects himself with his medicine, which he leaves in his backpack in case anyone searches his room, and goes to sleep.

When he wakes up, he hurts all over, as he always does from the medicine. He gets up, stretches his muscles and removes his clothes. He reapplies concealer over the wires in his arm and makes sure the reactor in his chest is still covered by the fake scarring. Then he puts on fresh clothes, similar to his pervious outfit: another button-down, another pair of jeans, neutral colors, his worn down sneakers.

Tony stands in front of the mirror and carefully smooths out his shirt, then fixes his hair. He likes it a little nonchalant, but still wants it to look neat. Then he sets to covering up the bruise on his cheek with concealer. He doesn’t use the heavy-duty one the Soldier uses for his wire, because Tony would never have access to that one. Instead he uses one he picked up at the airport. It’s definitely not thick enough to cover the bruise entirely, but he applies it in such a way that it makes the bruise look more faded. Like this, it won’t grab everyone’s attention as much, but Banner will still be able to clearly see it. He also disinfects the small cut from the General’s ring.

Then Tony takes a deep breath and makes his way out of the room, to Bruce’s dorm. He knocks. Bruce opens up pretty much right away, shrugging into a jacket and giving Tony a small smile. ‘I was just about to leave.’

‘I figured we could walk to the cafeteria together, right?’, Tony says, fidgeting with the sleeves of his shirt. ‘Since we live only like three doors apart. Also I’m not sure where the cafeteria is.’ He chuckles self-deprecatingly.

‘Oh,’ Bruce ruffles a hand through his hair, which is messy and a tad too long. ‘Of course, I’ll show you.’

He starts walking and Tony follows, still limping. His supposed injury could have gotten slightly better in the last few hours, but since Bruce believed Tony spent those hours running errands, the injury has only gotten worse.

‘How have you been doing?’, Bruce asks. ‘Getting settled in?’

‘Yeah,’ Tony says. ‘I’m hoping I can leave soon, though. Normally fights don’t last longer than a couple of days.’

‘Him changing the locks on you seems a little drastic, though, right?’ Tony can tell from the way Bruce says it that that’s been on his mind all afternoon.

Tony takes a moment to contemplate that. ‘I guess so. But, I mean, it’s his apartment and I can be a pain in the ass, so I get it. I don’t know why he wants to be with me in the first place.’ He pauses, then swallows, as if realising what he’s just admitted. ‘Why he wants to be _friends_ with me, that is.’

‘It’s okay if you’re – I don’t have anything against gays,’ Bruce says, voice growing quieter and quieter as he speaks.

‘Oh.’ Tony smiles. It’s a smile people have ruined their careers over, that people have given up all their secrets for, a smile so beautiful that people were glad they got to see it right before the Soldier shot them in the chest. ‘I think you’re the first person to even know me and him are a thing.’

Bruce doesn’t smile back. He frowns. ‘No one else knows?’

Tony shrugs. ‘If any of the neighbours found out, they’d tell the landlord and the landlord would evict us. If any of his friends found out, they’d probably forgive him as long as he’d break up with me. None of my friends live near here, I’m pretty sure if I told them, they just wouldn’t stay in touch anymore. I don’t really know who else there is to tell. His family is out of the question. So is mine.’

Bruce is still frowning. ‘You gotta be careful with that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Being isolated in a relationship can make it feel like there’s no way out,’ Bruce says quietly, seemingly lost in thought. ‘And you have no one to fall back on if things go south.’

Tony makes sure to look surprised and moved by Bruce’s concern and when Bruce looks up to meet his eyes, there’s a soft expression on his face. ‘Of course I don’t know what your relationship is like. But it’s important to have other people than just the one you’re with, so that you have a safety net if something goes wrong.’

Tony is quiet for a beat too long, then he snorts. ‘Easier said than done.’

Bruce sighs, slowly and shakily and right there is a weakness for the Soldier to exploit. He does not think Bruce has been in an abusive relationship himself, but people he cared about have been and didn’t ask for help, at least not initially. ‘Be careful, okay?’

Tony brushes his gloved hand against Bruce’s for a moment and smiles reassuringly. ‘Yeah. Of course.’

They enter the cafeteria, where some people are still eating, others simply sitting around a table full of empty trays and plates, playing cards or talking over each other.

The Soldier looks for exits first, as they make their way across the large room, then notes the baskets of knives and forks at the start of the queue for food, which are a good option should he need a weapon (although of course, he has a knife at his ankle as well, should he have time to grab it). Then he scans the people in the room, very quickly, for any obvious weapons or tells that they’re planning something. No one is behaving overly forced or casual, no one is looking at them out of the corner of their eyes, no one is hiding any guns. Knives, maybe, but it seems unlikely.

They get in the queue, only one person in front of them and only resume their conversation once they’re sitting down with their food.

‘What’s your major?’, Bruce asks.

‘Physics,’ Tony answers. The Soldier has checked, and there are pretty much no classes he could possibly share with Banner as a Physics major.

‘What year?’

‘Second.’

‘And you read the antielectron collisions thing?’ Bruce is clearly impressed.

‘Yeah, I – I guess I was kind of home schooled? For a lot of my life. Like, I went to a regular high school but my dad felt like that wasn’t enough. And he lay heavily on the exact sciences.’

‘Oh. Good. So what questions do you have?’

Tony asks him about his paper, the implications of it, and they talk for hours. Bruce is patient and articulate when he talks about things he’s so passionate about. He’s not as socially awkward or as little-adjusted as Ross made him out to be. Although the Soldier knew to take everything Ross says about Banner with a grain of salt, he is still surprised.

Bruce walks him back to his room, looking more relaxed than he did when Tony first saw him, smiling slightly at Tony’s rambling about computer technology and its potential. Tony kisses him on the cheek before they both return to their respective rooms, and watches Bruce touch the spot as he turns away while Tony closes the door.

-

The Soldier tends to entertain hobbies during missions. Any well-executed mission is filled with waiting, hours upon hours of it every day. If these hours are spent idling, sitting still, standing guard, it will arise suspicion. And so the Solider has hobbies. They usually serve the mission. When his target goes for a run every morning, the Soldier does, too, a good way to get to talking. If his target needs to fall for him, to desire him, he will dance, if the mission is long, he will spend his time at gyms and shooting ranges to stay in shape. 

This time there is no specific hobby that will serve his mission, he simply needs something to leave his dorm for. It is strange, to do something that servers no real purpose, to do something when you could be doing anything else. He chooses to spend his time on ballet. It is not the most practical choice, since he will have to find the right clothing and a place to practice, likely a place that has other people, but he decides that it could be useful despite the effort. Maybe in a couple of days, he could invite Banner along, and Banner could watch him and come to desire him. People are quick to want things they find beautiful, and that kind of desire is easily confused with love, which is easily confused with trust. And all he really needs from Banner is his trust.

There are dance studios on campus for Dance majors that are available to students between four and six, after college classes end and before dance classes for high schoolers and adults that are taught in the same space in the evening begin.

Most of the people who populate the studio are Dance majors, who are used to ignoring everyone else practicing beside them and aren’t impressed with a good but unpractised dancer like Tony.

Dancing is pleasurable, not like orgasms or expensive food, which are things that are pleasurable for as long as they last. Dancing gives him a durable pleasure, one that can sustain him for weeks if he needs it. He dances every evening, not because it is strictly necessary, but because he wants to. 

By day he does research, purposefully walks the hallways around the times Bruce’s classes start or end, only getting past small talk a couple of times. On Tuesday, he bugs Banner’s room and fits a tiny, Russian-made recording device into Banner’s glasses. The only part that’s thick enough to house it is the place where the glasses fold over his ear, but the recordings are at least audible, should all others fail. Through a phone call with Gilligan he confirms she is receiving transmissions from all recording devices. 

They have dinner in the cafeteria again, only talking about school because the Soldier knows better than to ask about Bruce’s personal life so soon. This is when he invites Bruce to join him for dance practice. Tomorrow is a Friday, when many students go out with friends and the dance studio tends to be deserted even before dinner. He picks the day on purpose, knowing Bruce will only shut down surrounded by too many people. Tony tells him he needs help fixing the stereo, which he takes apart and puts back together with one piece missing on Friday after classes are done.

Bruce helps him figure out what’s wrong with the stereo once he arrives only fifteen minutes later, the both of them seated on the floor by the mirror-covered wall, the stereo between them, and Tony tells him his father was good at stuff like this, but never let Tony help.

‘But you wanted to help?’, Bruce asks, looking up when a girl enters the room, glances at them and their broken stereo and starts warming up at the other side of the room.

‘Yeah,’ Tony answers, voice quiet. ‘He said I would just mess it up, though. He always thought I was too dumb for any of the stuff he was interested in.’

Bruce is quiet for a long time, exaggeratedly focused on the stereo so he doesn’t have to look at Tony, some of his longer curls falling in front of his face. ‘You know that’s not true, right?’, he says then, still not looking up. ‘I haven’t known you for long but you’re definitely not dumb.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Tony says. ‘He had the whole deathbed confession. Said I was a great kid. It was all very heart warming.’

‘You don’t believe him.’

Tony shrugs. ‘Not necessarily. Mostly I just don’t think his opinion is relevant all of a sudden just because it’s positive. My whole life I’ve told myself I don’t care what he thinks, then he has a good opinion of me and suddenly I do care?’ He focuses on the stereo for a moment, poking at a loose screw before tightening it. ‘Were your parents any better?’

‘My mom was great, but she passed when I was young. My dad… passed away, when I was sixteen.’

The Soldier knows that Brian Banner is alive and relatively well, that Bruce still sees him in court every now and again, because Bruce’s cousin is studying law and has convinced him somehow to sue his dad for all he has. It has turned into a messy little patchwork of cases, most of which Bruce is going to win, although what money he does get from it will have to go towards covering the legal fees and his student loans.

Tony laughs, something bitter to it. ‘”My dad passed away”, I assume that means you’re part of the Kids with Shitty Fathers Club?’

Bruce ducks his head, almost smiles. ‘I am,’ he says quietly. And then, even quieter, ‘he murdered my mom.’

‘Shit, Bruce,’ Tony manages, eyes wide and shiny with emotion. He touches his fingers to Bruce’s forearm and Bruce pulls away so abruptly he drops his screwdriver.

‘I’m sorry,’ Tony says.

Bruce looks up at him, making eye contact for the first time since they touched the topic of fathers. ‘It’s okay,’ he says. He looks down. ‘Makes me jumpy sometimes, thinking about all that.’

‘Yeah,’ Tony says. ‘I think we’re kinda opposite in that respect. Always makes me want to crawl close to someone and never let go.’

Bruce glances up at him, small smile on his lips, but he doesn’t say anything. Tony watches him finish fixing the stereo, carefully puts in the cassette Tony put beside them on the floor earlier, nods when it starts to play loud and clear. ‘Ballet?’, Bruce asks when he recognises Tchaikovsky, eyes on Tony again.

‘Surprised?’ He laughs. ‘I’m one of _those_ fairies. Wanna stay to watch? I don’t really have money for a coach. Maybe you can give me pointers?’

Bruce chuckles, shakes his head. ‘I have about as much experience with ballet as I do with happy families.’

‘That doesn’t matter. You’ve got your big brain, I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out what’s good and what’s bad when you see it.’

‘Okay, okay, I’ll use my big brain to figure out dancing.’

‘I have to say that is a most noble pursuit,’ Tony says, letting warm humour into his voice.

Bruce laughs. ‘Up, up, give my big brain something to work with, mister Ballet Dancer.’

Tony smiles at him, finishes putting on his pointes (he knows he’s not supposed to wear these kinds of shoes, but he’s learnt to dance on women’s pointes, and he likes them, to a certain extent, and knows that his body looks very attractive when he dances on them), which seem to cause Bruce vague concern, and gets up. ‘Could you rewind it to the first song?’, he asks Bruce as he starts going through warm-up exercises. 

Once the music starts playing, Tony dances, not holding back. He dances to the second song as well, trying to avoid looking at Bruce, at his reaction. He wants to dance for the sake of it, just for a moment, not for Banner or for the mission. ‘Rewind,’ he tells Bruce then, slightly out of breath. And Banner rewinds the cassette and the Soldier dances the same two routines again, and then another time. When the Soldier dances he does not feel like a gun, does not feel like nothing. Dancing is an interruption in his endless waiting to be used or directed. When he dances he is made of bone and muscle, instead of being defined by the wires running from his deformed hand to his deformed chest, the chemicals that stop him from aging, stop him from dying in cryo. When he dances he feels joy and he feels fear at having that joy taken away. He feels a desire to continue, although he does not normally desire anything.

When he stops, muscles and joints aching pleasantly, Bruce’s cheeks are flushed and his lips are parted. 

‘That was kind of terrifying,’ he says, when they are almost all the way back to their dorm rooms. Tony apparently managed to render him speechless for ten whole minutes. Bruce didn’t say a word the entire time Tony was changing shoes or when they left the studio. ‘You’re so skilled, Tony. I’ve never seen anything like that before. It’s like… like watching someone use the human body as it should be used, unlock its full potential. Everyone else just looks like idiots bumbling around in a meatsacks now.’

Tony laughs. ‘Does that mean you don’t have any pointers?’

Bruce laughs, too. ‘No. No, I don’t have any fucking pointers. My big brain could tell you only did good stuff, nothing bad.’

‘Thanks. I wonder what you’d be like watching ballet when you’re stoned. You already sound stoned now.’

Bruce shoves his shoulder, gently, and Tony sticks his tongue out at him. ‘You should come by some more though. We can both get stoned beforehand.’

‘Same time next week? I can get some pot by then.’

‘Perfect. We’ll see each other before that, though, right?’

Bruce gives him a surprised smile. ‘Of course.’

‘Okay.’ He leans up into Bruce’s space and presses a quick kiss to his cheek. ‘See you, Bruce.’

-

Getting beaten up looking the way the Soldier does is not hard. Crappy bar, late enough for everyone to be drunk already, an angry-looking guy who tells his friends he beat some sense into a fag not long ago. They’re not good friends, not good enough for the friends to join the fight were he to start one, though they wouldn’t try to stop him, either. Only a couple of wrong words from the Soldier and the guy is on him. He is willing to take it further than the Soldier expected, and once he’s beaten the Soldier up enough for Bruce to notice when they see each other later on, the Soldier stops him, steadily holding his wrists immobile until the guy backs off, freaked out by the Soldier’s sudden strength.

The next day, he limps as Bruce lets him into his room, which is messy although it seems like Bruce tried to clean it up. Bruce sits in his desk chair, Tony on his bed as Bruce lights the joint. ‘You okay?’, he asks.

Tony covered his bruises with concealer again, and touches his bruised cheek self-consciously. ‘Yeah. I feel great.’

‘Did you – what happened?’

‘Nothing happened.’

Bruce is quiet, takes a drag from the joint, passes it to Tony, who takes a drag, too. ‘Maybe I’m not gonna dance tonight, though.’

Bruce nods, gives him this searching look.

‘We should watch the real thing sometime, instead of my shitty ballet, like actual good dancers, some cute girls for you. I’ve always wanted to go to Moscow, see the Bolshoi perform.’

‘I can’t imagine they’d be that much better than you, Tony. You’re seriously crazy good.’

Tony shrugs. ‘Thanks.’

‘You don’t believe me.’

Tony just shrugs again.

‘I don’t know shit about ballet but I know you’re amazing, Tony.’

Tony musters a smile. ‘Okay.’

Bruce smiles back, hands over the joint again, watches Tony take a few more drags. The Soldier has been trained extensively in functioning while inebriated, often under the influence of drugs much stronger than marihuana. He has a very high tolerance, even though Bruce made the joint quite strong.

Bruce leans back in his chair. ‘You really wanna go to Russia?’

Tony pauses, trying to figure out why he’s asking. Not even the Soldier knows. Tony chuckles. ‘I want to go to a lot of places. Doesn’t mean it’s ever going to happen.’

‘I’ve been thinking… about leaving the country, these last few weeks. Russia never really occurred to me. Seems like such a shitty place.’

‘I don’t know. I speak Russian. So that helps.’

‘You speak Russian?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How did you learn Russian?’

‘My dad wanted me to be an engineer, and with Russia being so involved in space travel and stuff, he decided to have someone teach me. And he had this really close colleague from Russia, who always used to practice with me.’

‘Have you ever been to Russia?’

‘No.’

‘How about anywhere else?’

Tony laughs. ‘I went to Florida once.’

Bruce has a small smile on his face. ‘I’ve never been outside the US, either.’

‘Did you grow up poor, too?’

‘Yeah. Kind of. My dad could never keep a job for long.’

They’re quiet for a while, as Bruce takes more drags from the joint. Tony can tell he’s starting to feel it. He looks more relaxed, his eyes steadily focusing on the sky out the window instead of flicking back and forth. ‘Where did you think of going?’

‘What?’

‘You said you thought about leaving the country. Where would you go?’

‘Oh, um… I figured South America would be easiest, since I could get there by foot.’

‘You could get to South America by foot?’ This should not be a surprise to the Soldier, but he had not expected Banner to rely on his greener half for transportation.

‘I mean, like, without airplanes and shit. South Asia seems really beautiful, but I have no idea how I’d ever make it there. China would be good, would be safe from the US, but I don’t think I’d be able to get in.’

‘Safe from the US… Would you be running away from something here, if you left the country?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘But how come you don’t have to run right now?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you planning on doing something that’s going to get you into trouble?’

‘No. I already am in trouble.’

‘In what way?’

Bruce shakes his head. ‘A weird way.’

‘You can tell me.’

‘I can’t. You wouldn’t believe me.’

‘I would. I trust you.’

Bruce looks almost pained.

Tony sighs, raises his hands in defeat. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter as long as you don’t try to hurt yourself.’

‘What if I end up hurting you?’

‘I can take it.’

Bruce scoffs. ‘Doesn’t mean you should.’

‘Do you get high a lot?’

Bruce ponders that question for a while. ‘This is… The sixth time in the last seven days. So, yeah. A lot. Too much.’

‘You’re, like, addicted?’

Bruce shrugs. ‘Weed isn’t a bad thing to be addicted to. It helps with nightmares.’

‘You have that many nightmares?’

Bruce nods. ‘Every night.’

‘What about?’

He shrugs again. ‘Lots of things. World’s a scary place.’

Tony smiles. ‘You should at least get to be away from it in your dreams, right?’

‘What do you dream about, then?’

‘I don’t know. Happy stuff. Dancing and – and… nature and stuff. Sex. Things like that.’

Bruce lets himself topple to the side on his mattress, eyes on Tony. ‘Why do you let someone hurt you so much?’

‘What?’

‘Your boyfriend, why would you let him hurt you?’

Tony shrugs. ‘’Cause I like him. And he’s really smart and beautiful and he’s good to me, almost all of the time. And he loves me.’

‘Do you love him?’

Tony laughs. ‘I used to.’

‘Not anymore?’

‘Guy hits you enough times and love kind of starts to fade.’

‘But you stay with him?’

‘I’m not with him right now, am I?’

‘Sometimes when I don’t hear from you for a while, I’m scared you’ve gone back to him.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you think you’re gonna?’

‘I think, realistically, that I am. Because – I don’t know what else to do. I’ve told myself a thousand times that I’m going to leave him, but I don’t think I know how.’

Bruce watches him for a long time. ‘That’s such bullshit. Like, I know it’s true, that leaving is hard, but I wish it wasn’t.’

Tony smiles. ‘At least now I have a friend, right?’

‘What good is that going to do?’

Tony shrugs. ‘Moral support?’

Bruce doesn’t say anything, just sort of… mopes with face half-hidden by the pillow it’s pressed into.

‘I’m going to be fine, Bruce. I’ve been okay so far, haven’t I?’ Tony comes down from the desk chair and kneels by the bed, next to Bruce’s head. ‘I was lonely as fuck before I met you.’

‘I’m still lonely,’ Bruce says quietly. ‘I hate that, that nothing ever feels better, that it never ends even when I want it to. I think… I never understood those kinds of feelings, but I get it now.’

Tony reaches up, unsure, but Bruce doesn’t do anything to avoid him, just keeps his eyes on Tony while Tony gently touches his hair. The Soldier does not know what to say. He has talked someone into committing suicide once. He does not remember, but he knows he has. Despite this, he cannot imagine feeling so bad that you actually want to be dead.

‘Do you mean that you want to die?’

‘No… I… I want it sometimes, sure, but mostly I just think it would be better for everyone else.’

‘If you were dead?’

‘Yes.’ He buries his face in his pillow. ‘God, I sound dumb.’

‘No,’ Tony says, continuing to stroke his hair. 'You sound like you’re going through a hard time.’

‘But when is it going to end. “Hard time” makes it sound like there’s going to be easier times.’

‘There will be.’

‘But when?’

‘I don’t know.’

They’re quiet for a long time. Tony massages Bruce’s scalp while Bruce takes deep breaths.

‘Can I dance for you?’

Bruce lifts his face from the blankets. ‘It doesn’t hurt too much, to dance?’

‘Depends on how I dance.’

Tony gets up, starts a slow rhythm with his hips, raising his hands above his head, twirling his hands, shuffling his feet. It’s slower than ballet, less technical, but just as elegant. 

Bruce sits up slowly, mouth slightly ajar, and watches Tony. When Tony is done dancing, he lets himself fall onto the bed beside Bruce.

‘You’re incredible, Tony,’ Bruce tells him. 

Tony keeps his eyes on the ceiling. ‘Thank you.’

‘Will you tell me, when you go back to him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there anything I can do, to make it easier for you to leave him?’

‘I don’t think so.’

For a long time, they’re both quiet, lying shoulder to shoulder on Bruce’s bed. Eventually Tony returns his hand to Bruce’s hair and Bruce turns onto his side, resting his head on Tony’s chest.

-

Tony leaves for his boyfriend’s two days later. The Soldier shoves a note under Banner’s door while Banner is off to class because he doesn’t think Tony would tell him face to face.

-

Instead of going back to some sleazy bar to pick another fight, he calls Ross in personally to beat him up one final time, only a day after Tony supposedly went back to his boyfriend. Ross comes gladly. 

The Soldier times all of it perfectly. Banner is coming from a meeting with his thesis advisor when Ross walks out of their building, just in time for Banner to see Ross and hide before Ross sees him. 

Ross is not there for Bruce, but for Howard Collins, who is in his room, bones aching and throbbing, bruises forming seemingly everywhere. 

Ross' knuckles are raw, his posture relaxed. He's probably not even thinking about Banner for once. But Banner doesn't know that. To Banner it looks like Ross just searched his room, and his self-satisfied demeanour suggests that he actually found something with which to fuck up Banner's life. 

\- 

The Soldier is starting to drift out of his own mind by the time he reaches Banner's door, backpack slung over his shoulder, arm in a makeshift splint and wrapped in a towel filled with ice. 

Bruce doesn't open right away, so Tony knocks again. 'Bruce, it's me. Please be in there.' 

This time, it only takes eight seconds for Bruce to open the door, slowly. When he sees it really is just Tony, he opens the door a little further. Then he sees the state Tony is in and opens the door fully, ushering Tony in and hurriedly closing the door behind him and locking it. 

His room is neat, bare, even. In the middle of the room is a gym bag stuffed with messily folded clothing and a handful of books. 

'You're leaving?', Tony asks. The Soldier is in so much pain that he barely has to slur Tony's speech on purpose. He has been trained to withstand pain, but not to stay present throughout it. He chuckles weakly. 'So am I.' 

Bruce looks at him for a moment, then returns to packing his bag. It is a process that mostly consists of staring at his belongings until eventually leaving them be or packing them away. Whenever he decides to keep something, he removes something else from his bag to make up for it and puts it back on its shelf or in its drawer. 

After a minute and a half of this, he seems to remember what he just saw, startles and turns to Tony. 

'What happened to you?', he asks. 

'Thought my boyfriend was ready to make up. He wasn't.' 

'Shit.' 

'Yeah. I'm gonna leave the country for a while. I don't think he'll follow me across an ocean.' 

'Shit. Tony, what kind of fucking guy were you dating?' 

Tony shrugs, winces at the way it jostles his broken wrist. Bruce steps forward, worried. 'The maffia kind? I swear I didn't know about that when it started. Just figured he was a cute Italian guy. My parents are from Italy, too, you know. Mom would've loved a guy like that. Just thought he had a big family, that that was why he always had so many cousins around. Only learned later that they were body guards. That they each have a gun tucked in the back of their pants.' 

Bruce is silent for a moment. 'The US Army is after me,' he says then, quietly, as if hoping Tony won't hear. 

'The _army_? That's worse than my thing.' 

'One general specifically, but yeah. Pretty much.' 

Tony pauses. 'You wanna go to Russia?' 

Bruce looks pained. 'I can't afford that.' 

'I can. My ex is the rich kind of mobster, just has money lying around everywhere. He'd notice if I took a hundred thousand.' He holds open his pants pocket to show the wad of cash he has there, only a fraction of the money he has on him. 'He doesn't notice when I take five thousand.' 

Bruce's eyes are a little wide. He turns his head to look at his gym bag. He slowly walks over to his bedside drawer, withdraws its contents and carefully puts them away: a small box, supposedly of a ring, a threadbare journal, a small picture of a woman, a bracelet. 

'Okay,' he says, staring down at his gym bag now that he has zipped it shut. 'Okay. Russia.' He looks up at Tony. 'When is the flight?' 

'Two hours.' 

'Okay. Good. Let's go.' 

And so they go. They take a taxi, then a plane to London, where they have a seventeen hour layover before their flight to Moscow. They buy medical supplies at the LA airport and Banner helps set and splint the Soldier’s wrist on the plane while the Soldier tries to stay present, good hand clenching Banner’s elbow so tightly that Banner grits his teeth. The Soldier takes his medication and sleeps through the rest of the flight, still holding on to Banner’s arm and leaning into his space.

During the London layover is where things start to go wrong. The Soldier contacts his operatives on the phone in their hotel lobby while Bruce sleeps in one of the twin beds four floors above. 

There is a woman in the lobby, just reading. This in itself is not unusual. It is one am in London, but the hotel is close by the airport, and most of its guests are jetlagged and unable to sleep. What is unusual is that the Soldier feels something when he sees this woman. Something he cannot place. It is almost as if he has known her before. 

She could be a former target, but most of the Soldier's targets are the kind that have to be dead by the end of the mission. She could be a famous actress or ballerina, one he noticed before, subconsciously, in hours he spent with targets attending the ballet or watching theatre, but she is so young that he could only have come across her in his most recent mission, this one, and he has not seen any performances with Banner. He has not even watched any television. She could be an associate of a target, maybe during his last mission before his current one she was already old enough to be around such people, but looked different from how she looks now, and that's why he doesn't have any specific memories associated with her, only a vague feeling. 

The thing is that he was wiped after his last mission. He does not remember the target, let alone any of their associates. He could not possibly have felt strongly enough about any of them to remember them past a wipe. 

But here she is, and he can't stop his eyes from drifting to her as he repeats back the correct code words as the line reconnects and reconnects and reconnects. His handler tells him where the plane will wait for him outside Moscow. The Soldier disconnects the line. 

The woman stands and the Soldier, hyper aware of her, nearly startles. He touches his fingers to his forehead. Maybe he, too, is affected by the time difference. 

She walks past him, towards the exit of the hotel and impulsively, the Soldier follows her. She does not seem to notice. He assumes from the gun and knives hidden under her clothing that she is not a civilian, it might even be that she knows he is following her and lets him, although he wouldn't know why. Unless she recognizes him, too. 

He has been tailing her for half an hour when he notices the other man following her. He is well-trained, although not as invisible as the Soldier. 

The Soldier isn't sure about the best course of action. Normally he has orders for these kinds of situations, now he has choices. He could follow the woman or he could follow the man. He could continue to stay hidden or make his presence known. 

Eventually he decides to go back to the hotel room, head aching with all the things happening in his mind that are not supposed to happen. 

Bruce is awake and sits up in his bed when he sees the Soldier. 'Where were you?' He asks, voice hoarse from sleep. 

'I was booking a hotel in Moscow,' the Soldier says, unable for a moment to slip back into Tony. 

'Oh. You were gone a long time.' 

Tony takes something out of his pocket that he bought while tailing the woman, a pack of cigarettes, and smiles apologetically. 'Stress-smoking. Wanted some air. It's pretty nice outside. Thought England would be way colder.' 

Bruce gives him a small smile. 'Can I have one?', he asks. Tony hands him the pack, digs in his pockets for the lighter and hands it over, too. He watches Bruce light the cigarette, take a drag. Tony sits down on the edge of his bed. 'This is crazy,' he says. 

Bruce smiles. 'Yeah.' 

Tony takes his free hand in his own gloved one. Bruce watches their entangled fingers, smokes his cigarette. 

'Why do you always wear the gloves?', Banner asks. The Soldier has been waiting for him to ask all this time, but even on the plane, when Banner was bandaging his wrist and Tony refused to take off the glove, he did not.

'My left hand is fucked up. And wearing just one glove is weird, so.' 

'Fucked up how?' 

Tony shakes his head, holds up his left hand, shows its limited range of motion by barely crooking his fingers. 'Just fucked up. The fingers got crushed and healed wrong.' 

Tony isn't sure what happens next. He doesn't feel present anymore. Not even the Soldier feels present. There is just the body on the bed, holding the mission's hand. And there is fear. Because once the mission has been taken to the Red Room, there will be more pain, more forgetting. The Soldier doesn't know who this intruder is in his body, who fills his mind with fear. 

The mission frowns, lets go of the body's hand when the body tugs free. The body almost falls off the bed in its desperate scramble to get away. It speaks, first in Russian, then in Italian, but it does not know what it is saying. 

The mission stands and comes towards the body. The body bows its head, tugs at its clothes because it knows what comes next. This is an inevitability, one that scares it, but that it knows it cannot avoid. 

'Tony, Tony,' the mission says. 

The body makes itself small, on its knees, head covered with its arms. Eventually the mission stops saying names. He no longer says anything at all. The body has its eyes squeezed shut, but it knows the mission has retreated to the bed and finally the body, having tired itself out, relaxes. 

\- 

The Soldier only returns to the body much later. Banner seems to be asleep again, although he wakes up when the Soldier gets up. 

'I'm sorry,' Tony says. His voice is hoarse. He must have screamed and shouted. 'Panic attack.' 

'That wasn't a panic attack. You were speaking in code. My Marathi is shit, but you were just saying random words. In six languages, at least.' 

Tony is quiet, eyes on the floor. The Soldier does not know what to say. 

'You know, the shitty father thing? Kind of an understatement.' 

Bruce is sitting in his bed, very still. He doesn't react to Tony's admission. Beside him, on the nightstand is a piece of paper filled with hurried scribbles in three languages. There are transcriptions, incomplete and only half correct, of what the body must have said in Marathi while it had expelled the Soldier, and English translations under some of the words. At the very bottom of the page are phonetical transcriptions of Russian words, adjusted five times over, as if the body repeated the same thing so many times that Bruce got it right eventually. Someone halfway between Tony and the Soldier sits on the other bed, only three feet away from Banner's, and fills in the blanks.

He feels strange. He is still Tony, but he is no longer as separated from the Soldier. Tony now knows what the Soldier knows: that Tony is not real, that Banner is only a mission, that everything Tony does leads them closer to completing the mission and returning to their life of pain.

Once he is done, he stares numbly at the paper. Apparently he recited an entire encoded mission report, although he does not remember the mission. The Russian words at the bottom are the code words the technicians use to awaken the Soldier after a wipe, as if his body tried its hardest to get him to come back. 

He shows Bruce, feeling numb, feeling like it doesn't matter anymore. He no longer has to gain Bruce's trust. In less than twenty four hours this will all be over. They will be back in the Red Room, they will both be wiped and used as weapons. 

Bruce frowns as he reads. 'What is this?' 

'Sometimes I am made to hurt people,' he says. 'I forget who I am and I am given a mission and then I complete it. Those words at the bottom are what my father used to make me forget myself.' 

'Like hypnosis?' 

'I guess. But stronger, more permanent. I can't just snap out of it.' 

Bruce is silent for a long time, reading the mission report over and over, disbelieving. 

Eventually he looks up at the Soldier. 'I was making a gamma bomb for the US Army as my thesis project. It exploded in my face. Literally. Now I turn into a big green monster when I'm angry. My cells blow up, I can't change back until the monster calms down.' 

Tony is surprised. The Soldier is, too. Neither of them knows what to say. 'That's why they're after you?' 

'Yeah.' 

Tony clings his throbbing wrist to his chest. Now that he's back to himself, he is aware of the pain again. 'Does it hurt? Turning into him.' 

Bruce shrugs. 'For a moment.' He beckons Tony over and Tony comes. He sits back down on the edge of Bruce's bed. Tony lets him take his broken wrist, the wrist of his left hand, wires running up and down the length of it. It doesn't matter that Bruce sees. The splint must have shifted when the Soldier was gone from the body, and Tony is moved that Bruce noticed and wants to fix it.

'Can I take off the glove?', Bruce asks. 

'Yes,' Tony whispers. In this moment, he would do anything for Bruce, as long as he keeps reaching for Tony’s messed up wrist, keeps looking at Tony like he’s something that can be fixed.

Bruce does it slowly, carefully, without hurting Tony's arm as much as Tony anticipated. There is a long moment of pause as Bruce processes the sight of Tony's deformed hand. The small circle of metal, raised a quarter of an inch above his palm, the skin around it thick with scar tissue, dead-looking purply grey. The pale, burnt finger tips, the skin healed over so many times that it doesn’t quite look like skin anymore, but like something inorganic, made at some factory and shoved off the assembly line because it does not look good, smooth, clean.

Eventually, he unties the splint from around Tony's arm and redoes it once he has made sure the bone hasn't shifted. Sometimes he stops in the middle of his work to stare at Tony's hand, or to trace his fingers feather-light over the shadow of the wire visible underneath the concealer, but he still does not comment. 

The mini bar has a tiny freezer compartment with ice in it and Bruce wraps some of it in one of the fluffy hand towels from the en suite bathroom and hands it to Tony. 

'This wasn't just you dad hypnotising you and using you as a hit-man, was it?' 

'I don't have a dad.' He smiles slightly, looking up at Bruce, then down at his damaged hand. '"I am one of twenty eight Black Widow agents with the Red Room. The training is hard, but the glory of Sovjet supremacy and the warmth of Mother Russia makes up for it."' He pauses. 'I wasn't one of the twenty eight. They were all girls, all Russian. I was trained with them, but I was the American. They could not treat me the same as them. So they reeducated them and wiped me, they hurt them and they tortured me, they improved them and they deformed me.' 

Bruce looks sad. 'They experimented on you.' 

'Yes.' 

'And you're not really Tony?' 

'I am who I need to be to complete the mission.' 

'And I am your mission?' 

The Soldier is quiet, and admission. 

'And I walked right into it. God, that's so pathetic. I just fell for it.' 

'Bruce. I am good at this, better than anyone else. Everyone falls for it. You are not the first.' 

Bruce is quiet. 'Why are you telling me this now? We're not in Russia, yet. I can still escape.' 

The Soldier shakes his head. 'There is no escape,' he says. 

Banner frowns. 'Did you forget about the giant green rage monster thing?' 

'Feel your heartbeat,' the Soldier says. 

When Banner does not move, Tony takes his hand in his, folds out his index and his forefinger and presses them to Banner's own wrist, where his pulse is beating a lazy rhythm. 'Your blood pressure is very low,' the Soldier tells him. He pinches Banner’s thigh and Banner lets out a yelp, but is still pressing his own fingers to his wrist. 'See,' the Soldier tells him. 'It won't speed up. That’s why you feel dizzy. Not because of jet lag.' 

The Soldier put powdered blood pressure pills in all of his food and all of his drinks. 

Banner looks nauseated. 'You fucking -' He doesn't finish the sentence. 

'It will not be as bad for you,' the Soldier promises him. He does not know why he wants to reassure Banner, why he wants him to not be as angry with the Soldier as he is right now. 'They will only hurt the green man.' 

Banner lunges for him, hands on the Soldier's shoulders, squeezing down as if he would rather strangle him. Banner is strong, but he is untrained and guided only by anger. The Soldier overpowers him easily. His mind screams at him as he pins Banner to the mattress and kisses him. The body wants to get away, and the Soldier feels as if he is going to retreat again, to leave the body to deal with all the pain and fear. But this will not be pain, will only be sex. The Soldier can deal with sex. He can be Tony, until it is over.

Banner does not kiss him back, trying to twist his head away, and the Soldier grows frustrated. He kisses Banner's neck, pinning his wrists above his head with his good hand and pinching Banner's nipple with the other, the bad one. Banner lets out something akin to a moan and struggles even harder against the Soldier. 

The Soldier does not understand, but he sits back, straddling Banner but letting go of his wrists. 

'What are you doing?', Banner asks, more annoyed than anything else. 

'You want to fuck me,' the Soldier says because it is so obvious. 

'You just told me you're a brainwashed spy who's going to hand me over to a secret organization that's going to use me as a weapon. You _poisoned_ me.' 

Tony cants his hips, dragging his ass against Banner's erection. 'Still, you want to fuck me.' 

'I think you're arousing. Doesn't mean I want anything to do with you.' 

The Soldier frowns. Slowly, he gets up. Banner sits up, presses two fingers to the pulse point in his neck. 

'I want to go outside,' he says. 'A park or something. In between now and the flight to Moscow, that's what I want to do.' 

'Okay,' the Soldier says. He retrieves his left glove from the bedside table where Bruce put it and starts to laboriously pull it on. Banner watches, apparently having had temporarily forgotten about the Soldier's deformed hand. 

Banner gets dressed and the Soldier watches. They put on their shoes and their coats and take their luggage with them. They don't have to come back here before heading to the airport. 

The woman is in the hotel lobby again and reads her book as they check out. The Soldier worries that she might tail them once they leave, but as Banner and him walk through the city, still dark and deserted in the early morning, the Soldier does not see her behind them. 

They find a small park with a small pond and sit on a dewy bench. The Soldier takes a bottle of water out of his backpack and hands it to Banner. 

Banner looks at it, then at the Soldier. He realizes it has the blood pressure medication in it, but accepts it from the Soldier and downs half of it in one go, features hard. 

'My dad always told me I had a monster in me. That's why he beat me, he said. I tried a lot of things to get it out of me. I cut away at myself, I bled, I made myself throw up. One time I tried praying to God. Figured maybe he could just take it out of me. So I went to church. I tried to go when no one was there, but Ms. Carolyn, who played the organ, lived right next to the church, and she'd be there often. If she was in her house, she'd see me go in and come over to the church, and she'd just sit with me. And sometimes she'd take me to a diner and buy me a slice of pie and coffee. Or fries and a big salad. I hated the carrots, so she'd always steal those off my plate. I hated the coffee, too, but she'd make me drink that anyway, and she never let me put any sugar in it. We were friends. I was fifteen and lonely, but for the first time I had a friend… She got pregnant, and then she lost the baby and found out she was very, very sick, and she tried to kill herself. And I was so angry at her. I didn't visit her in the hospital, I didn't go back to church. She came to my house and I ignored her, even though she knew I was there. I saw her at the grocery store and I ignored here there, too. That's my biggest regret. Not the bomb, not that I didn't save my mom, or that I lived with my dad for so long. My biggest regret is never forgiving Ms. Carolyn. I asked around in town, last time I was there. She actually did succeed in killing herself, eventually.' 

The Soldier doesn't say anything, just listens to Banner as he continues to speak about Ms. Carolyn, how they made pancakes, once, and another time he came for dinner at her house and she cried for most of the evening, although she never told him why. 

His voice is soothing, and the Soldier feels surprised when it turns harsher, lower, and a piece of cloth closes over his mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Tyler, the Creator's Running Out Of Time
> 
> Comments, kudo's or any kind of feedback is super appreciated!


	2. The Cabin

He wakes up in a car, on his side, back seat. He can see Banner sitting in the passenger seat. Seeing the driver would require moving, which would give away that he is awake. 

'Yeah, but that doesn't answer my question. You can say anything you want. How can I _know_?', Banner is saying.

'You can't. But I'm your only hope right now. It's trusting me or going to Russia with the American.' 

Woman's voice, something familiar to it, the faintest trace of a memory, scratching the back of his mind. 

'This could be part of the plan.' 

'Not in any way that would make sense.' 

Banner sighs, as if he already knew this. 'Do you think you can make him better? Like you.' 

'I wouldn't say I'm all better, yet. And I don't know. They did much worse things to him than they did to me.' 

'In the hotel room, he had an - I don't know. He was terrified, all of a sudden, he didn't recognize me anymore, started reciting a, he translated it for me, it was a report of an assassination. And a code. That they used to make him do what they say. Do you think that was - when he was acting like that, that was still himself in there?' 

'I don't know, Bruce. This has been going on for decades. There might not be any 'self' left of him.' 

'What if that’s really the case? What if he can't be saved?' 

'Then we put him down.' 

There is a silence. Then, the woman says, 'He's awake.' 

Banner turns to look at him. The Soldier sits up, studies the driver, the red-haired woman from the hotel. 

'Where are we going?', he asks in Russian. Through the windows he only sees farmland, presumably, hopefully the English countryside. He can't have been out long enough for them to get to Wales or Scotland from just some chloroform. 

'We're headed someplace you can stay for a while,' she answers in English. 

'How did he find you?', he continues in Russian. He is angry with Banner. He has never been angry before, but now he is. 

'I contacted Bruce on the plane. He did not know who you were, yet, but I made sure he'd know to come to me once he found out. He did.' Again, she speaks English. 

'Stop translating!', he says in Russian. He feels petulant in his anger for Banner. He thinks maybe he is still Tony. Tony would be angry if Bruce betrayed him. The Soldier would feel nothing at all. 

'Do you want me to speak Russian?', she asks in English, tone so chillingly cold Bruce leans away from her. She continues on in Russian. 'Yearning -' It’s the first word of the code that wipes his mind and makes him comply.

'No! Stop! Stop!', Tony (not Tony, that does not feel right) begs in Russian, squirming in his seat. 

'We are going to help you,' she says in English. 'You just -' 

The car swerves. The woman pulls at the wheel, manoeuvres the car to the side of the road, looking around, already reaching for her gun before the car is fully standing still. The Soldier reaches for his own weapons, but they have all been removed, even the most hidden ones. 

A man approaches the car, the man who had been tailing the red-haired woman in London. He is holding a bow and arrow. From the way the car slightly slopes down towards the front right side, the Soldier assumes he used that same bow and arrow to shoot out one of the tires. 

'I'm not giving you the benefit of the doubt this time,' he yells. 

The woman rolls down the window, pointing her gun through it almost casually. 'You better have a fucking spare tire for me,' she says. 

'Nat, you don't get it. I'm here to take you in. You had one chance, remember? Ya blew it.' 

'Oh.' She jerks her head behind her, indicating the Soldier. 'I'm not working with him.' 

'She is! She is! Kill her!', the Soldier yells. He does not know who he is anymore. He is too angry to be the Soldier, but he is not Tony either. Or he is some new version of Tony, one who makes his head hurt with all the things he feels.

'He's been brainwashed like me. I knew him, in the Red Room. I want to save him.' 

The man lowers his bow slightly. It's a perfect opening for the woman to shoot him, but she doesn't. 

'You!', Tony yells when he realizes why he feels so strange. 'My medication. You messed with it.' 

He'd taken it first thing when they got to the hotel room. He'd told Bruce it was insulin. Bruce had insisted on helping him administer it. He had not even considered he could have changed out the medicine. 

'Please! Please, let me have my medicine. I don't want to feel this.' 

The woman, fool that she is, looks away from the man to look at Bruce. 'What do you think we should do?' 

Banner looks pained. 'He seems to be doing worse without it. We could let him have it until we get to the safe house.' 

'Good. Okay, you give him his meds. I'm gonna talk to Clint.' 

They both step out of the car, the woman walks out to the front with the man, so that Tony can watch them talk through the windshield. Banner walks to the trunk of the car. Tony can hear him rummage around in it. Then the door to the back of the car opens. Banner sits down next to him and closes it again. He hands Tony the syringe with his medicine. Tony tries to inject it, but his hands are shaking so badly that Bruce has to do it for him. Everything starts to ache almost right away and Tony lies down on his side again, resting his head in Bruce's lap without permission. There is a moment that Bruce goes very still, but then he relaxes and gently pushes his fingers into Tony's hair, drawing circles on his scalp. 

'I'm not Tony,' Tony says. 'Tony is a fake name. I don't have a name.' He reaches up, blindly, until his fingers bump into Bruce's stubbly chin. He traces the line of his jaw, winds one of his curls around his fingers, fascinated with the textures, rough, then smooth, then soft, all warm. 'I don't have a name.' 

The mind - not Tony, not the Soldier, no one -, the mind does not know if Bruce answers. It does not know anything. Its body aches and it goes to sleep. 

\- 

The Soldier wakes up with his head still resting in Banner's lap. The car is moving again. The woman sits behind the wheel, the man in the passenger seat. 

He no longer feels petulant anger or unnecessary panic. Everyone inside his mind is back where they should be, back to normal. 

Banner is looking out the window while absent-mindedly stroking the Soldier's hair. 

The Soldier sits up, but stays in the middle seat. Banner watches him for a moment, then looks back out of the window.

The Soldier’s hand is held immobile in a not-quite-dry cast. There are still some dry plaster scraps on the car floor at Banner’s feet, but they must have parked the car at the side of the road while Banner applied the cast, because there isn’t any water spilled across the floor. Banner’s finger nails are still edged white.

They don't drive for that long before they get to the safe house. It's a small cottage by a lake. Scotland, judging from the names of the towns they pass. The woman guides them to the front door, warning them to only step where she steps. The Soldier can see the signs of booby traps, knows they're going to be just as difficult to avoid leaving the house as they are entering it. There are only a few yards of clear space around the cottage, enough for a smoke or a short walk around, not enough for anything else.

'We're going to stop giving you your medication,' the woman tells him as she lets them all inside. There is a modest living room, five doors and one window. 'Withdrawal lasts a week, at least. You can stay here as long as you can, but there is a locked basement should you need it. 

'I want to keep taking them,' the Soldier says. 'I cooperate now. I will not without the medication.' 

'You will eventually.' 

'I don't want to be that person,' he says quietly. 'I want to be who the medication makes me.' 

'The person you are with the medication doesn't want anything.' 

The Soldier feels a certain kind of regret, knowing that in less than two days, he will go back to the fear and anger he was stuck in not long ago. All of the different people populating his mind will run free and attempt to take over, or worse, they will flee and all that will be left will be the body and its endless pain. 

'I think the heating broke again,' the man says. The woman and him leave. The Soldier can tell from their footsteps that they don't go very far. He can hear them speak to each other in another room. 

'Bruce, please,' Tony whispers, stepping closer to him, head bowed. 'Don't let them do this to me. Don't let them take my medication.' 

'It's for your own good,' he says gently. 

'You saw me off the medication. I was delirious. I could not remain the same person for more than ten minutes. Is that really good for me?' 

'We're gonna help you get better, Tony. Natasha went through all this, too, and she's better now.' 

'You don't get it. She wasn't treated the way I was. She still had a name. She was not tortured like I was.' He pulls off his left glove, traces the metal under his skin with a finger. 'My medication has many purposes. It counteracts the palladium poisoning the metal causes.' This is not true. It is a lie, one of which the Soldier cannot trace the origin. 'I will get sick without the medication. I will go crazy and hurt myself. Please, Bruce.' He leans forward, presses a kiss to his lips, his good hand coming up to cup Bruce's jaw. 'Please. I will lose everything without the medication. I will lose myself.' 

He kisses Bruce again and Bruce kisses back, seemingly automatically. Tony pulls back, but stays close, their noses touching. Bruce has gone very still, but he is not yet pushing Tony away. 

'Tony, stop.' 

'Please,' Tony whispers. 'Bruce, don't let them hurt me.' 

He kisses Bruce again and this time Bruce does push him away.

The man is watching them from the doorway and sighs. ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this again after barely five years. Bruce, you’re doing great.’

‘Am I?’, Bruce asks, taking a step back from Tony, although he raises his hand to touch his wrist. ‘Tony is right that this is going to be different from how it was for Natasha. Maybe he’s right that we should keep using the meds on him.’

‘I think we have to find out what the damage is first. You said you knew someone who could help us figure this out?’

‘I said I know a pharmacist who has worked with experimental drugs before. She can have a look at it, don’t know if she’s gonna be able to tell us anything. I don’t even know if she’ll have the time.’

‘You should call her. Even the vaguest of information could be of help right now.’

Bruce nods. ‘Where’s the phone?’

‘Kitchen. Just through there.’ He points over his shoulder with his thumb, to the second door.

Bruce disappears into the other room and the Soldier watches the man, Clint, who watches him in turn. ‘Bruce is a civilian,’ Clint says quietly. ‘He may be doing pretty well so far, but he’s still human, and he’s totally fallen for whatever character you were playing for him. I know you can do it, but it’s gonna be easier for everyone, you included, if you don’t break him, okay? We got the blood pressure pills, but those only work as long as he’s willing to take them.’

The Soldier does not say anything, but keeps an eye on Clint as he walks around the Soldier and climbs over the back of the scruffy looking green couch to sit in it.

‘What was the Widow like?’

Clint twists around on the couch to look at the Soldier, slinging his arm over the back of the couch. ‘When she was still on the meds they gave her?’

The Soldier nods.

‘Violent. Cold. Honestly she was a lot like she is now, but less empathic. Less… I don’t know. Less aware of other people.’

‘What do you mean?’ The Soldier cannot untangle himself from Tony anymore. He does not know which one of them asks the question.

Clint sighs. ‘I’ve been awake for forty hours. I honestly don’t know what I mean.’ He pauses. ‘She was… she forgot that other people were human, that she was human. She saw everyone as a set of facts on which to base predictions of behaviour on, and then she’d try to change that behaviour. But that’s not what humans are like. If you look at humans like that you miss all the parts that matter… Humans are just idiots who don’t know what they’re doing but who are doing a ton of shit anyway. And who… she’d forget that people are connected, that we’re not just a bunch of separate facts, that we all can learn to care about each other.’

The Soldier has no idea what to do with that. At least Clint is right about one thing: the being-an-idiot part.

Tony goes to where Clint said the kitchen is, and sits in one of the chairs standing around a table that has one broken leg.

Bruce is still on the phone, speaking quietly. ‘…on the top of the stairs, you just open the latch. It’s never locked. And then it’s just in the north corner… I know. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know where else to put it… I’ll owe her. Even if she can’t figure it out. From what I get this is, like, top-secret Russian stuff, so I don’t know if there’s going to be even one component… Yeah. Thank you, Jane. Seriously.’

He puts the phone back in the receiver and turns to Tony.

‘Are you sure you want to stay for this?’, Tony asks.

‘I can’t go back to the US. There’s not really anywhere else for me to go, either.’

Tony digs up the cash he still has in his pocket. ‘You could go to Asia. China might be tricky, but there’s lots of other places with big crowds and a hatred for the US Military. The US hasn’t been too keen on international involvement since Vietnam, anyway. You go to Asia now, they’ll never find you again. They won’t even look for you.’

‘You want me to leave.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘When I am with you, I forget I am not Tony,’ the Soldier explains.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I am the Soldier. I was also Tony, but only temporarily. The mission is over, so now I am no longer Tony, but when I see you, I am Tony again. This is not right.’

‘Normally you don’t see your – your target, after the mission is done, right?’

‘Normally, they are erased from my memory.’

‘Natasha said your memory might get fucked up over the course of this. That you might no longer remember stuff you do now, or remember stuff you currently don’t.’

Bruce pauses for a moment, then speaks again. Tony only realises now that they’re standing much closer than they were at the start of this conversation. ‘Is that what happened at the hotel, when you were speaking different languages?’

‘You said I spoke Marathi, that’s what you transcribed?’

Bruce nods.

‘I didn’t know I spoke Marathi. I didn’t know I killed that man.’

‘How many missions have you had, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. So many that the exact number doesn’t matter.’

For a while they’re both quiet.

‘Bruce, I want to kiss you, but only with your permission.’

‘Are you forgetting you aren’t Tony?’

‘Yes. But I want to forget. For now. I liked being Tony.’

And so they kiss. Bruce is a good kisser. The Soldier does not remember faces, but he remembers slimy tongues and thin, chapped lips. Fingers like sausages that groped inexpertly, although they belonged to someone much older than Bruce. Bruce is decisive with where he puts his hands, one at the nape of Tony’s neck, the other at his wrist, his good wrist, finding his fingers and tangling them with his own.

‘What’s going to happen to me?’, Tony asks.

‘I don’t know. I think you’re going to get better. But it might take a while.’

‘What if you can’t make me better. What if I’m just a weapon you can’t control?’, Tony asks.

Bruce doesn’t say anything. Tony, or perhaps the Soldier, listens to his breathing, puts a hand on Banner’s chest to feel how steadily it goes up and down.

‘Will you be able to let them kill me?’, the Soldier asks.

Bruce is quiet for a moment. ‘No,’ he whispers, then.

The Soldier kisses him once more.

-

Things get worse from there. For long stretches of time, Tony is gone, even Banner cannot bring him back. The Soldier tries to remain inside the body, but he, too, leaves from time to time. He knows the mind is still inside somewhere, but it stays hidden. All that is left is the body.

The body is in pain, constantly, and filled with fear, constantly. It fights against the three people it encounters, but it is not very good at fighting at all. Finally it hides, and the people do not come after it, and when it is so exhausted it has no other choice, it sleeps.

Many of the following time is spent asleep. Sometimes the Soldier wakes, sometimes the body does. Once, a man named Mario wakes up instead, and he regrets killing the ambassador, who he knows grew to love him dearly.

After a while, the sleeping moves to the bathroom the Soldier finds. When he is awake, either the Soldier or the body, he pukes into the toilet bowl, shivering and shaking. Sometimes he screams and shouts and pounds his fists against the tile. He yells for Banner, who finds him with washcloths and mouthwash and a bowl of soup.

The Soldier refuses to drink the soup, begs Banner to help him find his medication. By now the shaking is so badly he can barely walk, and his muscles ache worse than they do when he does take the meds.

Banner, somehow, coaxes him back to bed, where he’s put a bucket within reach. He piles lots of extra blankets on top of the Soldier, and the Soldier is too weak to do anything about it. He tries to convince Banner to come closer, to kiss the Soldier. Maybe like this he can get Tony to come back.

But Banner does not want to kiss him. He sits in the doorway of the room, where he is within the Soldier’s line of sight even when the Soldier stays lying in the bed. He picks up a book that he must have put there before he came to find the Soldier in the bathroom and starts to read.

‘What if Tony never comes back?’, the Soldier asks at length. His voice is hoarse and quiet, but Banner hears. He goes very still, and then he looks up from his book.

‘I think, realistically, there’s a big chance that he’s gone.’

‘But what then?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Will you leave?’

‘No.’

‘But you only care about Tony.’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you do. But you can’t tell him apart from me. You believe that I am still him.’

Banner is quiet for a long time, chewing on his lip. ‘I think that might be true. I can’t tell you apart. Who are you right now?’

‘I have no name. They call me Soldier, or American, or subject.’

‘What do you want me to call you?’

‘I don’t want anything.’

Bruce returns to his book, and for a while, the Soldier drifts in and out of sleep.

‘Where is the Widow?’, he asks, hours later.

Bruce glances up at him. ‘Natasha is looking for information on how you ended up in the Winter Soldier program and who you were before that.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

‘She’s in Bulgaria with Clint. There is supposed to be someone there who knows more about you.’

The Soldier shakes his head. ‘I am not anyone. I was never anyone.’

‘You have to have been someone at some point. The earliest records the Red Room have of you say you’re twelve. You have to have had a life before that.’

‘Shut up.’

The room returns to silence and the Soldier hopes to find sleep again, but he cannot. He rolls onto his other side so that he no longer has to see Banner, but this does not help. He tries lying on his back, his left side, his right side again.

He is lying on his right side, watching Banner turn pages when he feels it, himself slowly retreating from his own head. The body does not panic, this time, because it knows the mind is there. It makes itself small, curling up under the blankets.

The mission looks up momentarily, but seems to think nothing of it and looks back to his book.

The body squeezes its eyes shut and starts to shiver. The mind remembers things the Soldier does not: pain, people in lab coats speaking loudly, a woman with red hair who refused to pull the trigger. It knows that this woman was here, that she has been in the same room as him, but it is glad that she is gone now. She only confuses the Solider, leaves him slow and quiet and stubborn.

The Soldier does not know her, but he can feel it, that the body remembers, that the mind still holds on to its petty grudge.

The body opens its eyes and watches the mission, who is unlike other missions. He is not old, not cruel, not violent. Someone has cut his hair, but it still curls prettily. Someone has given him new clothing, warm and practical, muted colours. The body remembers him wearing red and purple and orange and foolishly, the body misses this, the colours, more than anything else, more than the steady presence of the Soldier in his mind, more than the temporary presences of boyish heartbreakers, quiet dazzlers, smart and dumb and cold and warm, all named Tony or Howard or Edward or Mario.

The mission looks up, uncomfortable with the body’s attention.

For a moment, they don’t speak, just look at each other. The mission closes his book and sets it down on the ground beside himself.

‘Who are you now?’, he asks. His voice is very quiet, almost a whisper.

The body does not answer. It has no use for words. It wants nothing to do with them.

The mission continues to watch him and the body wants to crawl out of its own skin, to become incorporeal, so that anyone who tried to touch it, would only watch their fingers fall through its skin. It wants to be so cold that no one can stand to come near it, so bright no one will even look at it.

A moment later, it is at peace with the mission’s attention; if not comfortable, then indifferent.

The mission, very quietly, but with clear enunciation, starts to read from his book. It discusses psychology, quite basic things that the mind already knows.

But the mission’s voice is soothing, and the body falls asleep again.

The Soldier wakes up. He no longer hurts all over. The nausea is gone.

Banner is still sitting in the doorframe, and jerks out of his sleep as the Soldier is sitting up. He looks blearily at the Soldier as the Soldier comes towards him and slowly sits down in front of him. He takes Bruce’s hand where it’s lying on his belly and pulls it towards his hair. Banner gets the hint and strokes the Soldier’s messy hair, his cheek, his jaw.

The Soldier drapes his legs over Banner’s and leans his head against his chest, while Banner continues to stroke his hair.

They sit like this, and this time the Soldier does not fall asleep, although Banner does. The Soldier listens to his heartbeat speed up. Banner’s leg twitches, once, twice, and he jerks awake with a gasp.

The Soldier wraps his arms around Banner’s waist. ‘Nightmare?’

Banner is still catching his breath, eyes flashing around the room as he tries to regain his grip on reality. Eventually he relaxes and wraps his arms around the Soldier. ‘Yeah. Sorry.’

The Soldier does not say anything, waiting.

He had expected Banner to recount his nightmare to him, but Banner does not say anything at all. His hand strokes slowly over the Soldier’s back.

‘How many… You said I can’t tell apart all the different people that you are. How many are there?’

The Soldier gives that some thought. He is not sure that he knows. He is a guest, after all, he does not know the body like it knows itself, does not remember its entire history. It barely knows the mind at all.

‘Three, me included. Plus anyone I am to complete the mission.’

‘And was anyone – do you think anyone was there originally, out of the ones that are still there?’

‘I don’t know.’ He thinks perhaps the body, perhaps the mind. That might be why they cannot leave, even when the Soldier can, why they always stay behind when bad things happen, especially the body.

Bruce nods.

‘Does it matter?’

‘I guess not.’

The Soldier tilts up his head slowly. Banner is looking at his face as the Soldier leans in and kisses him. It is a reluctant kiss. Banner’s hands stay on the Soldier’s back, but he does not pull the Soldier closer, he does not lean in further.

The Soldier leans back to look at Banner, and then he kisses his jaw. ‘Why do you kiss me?’, he asks.

Banner is quiet. He has gone very still.

The Soldier kisses his jaw once again, then the corner of his mouth. ‘Do you miss Tony?’

Banner almost smiles and lets out a sigh. ‘Tony wasn’t real.’

‘Are you convinced I am him? That I only pretended a small bit? And that the rest of Tony was really me?’

‘I don’t know what I think of you.’

‘But you want me to be him? You want him back.’

Bruce shakes his head, but remains quiet.

‘You want the original? Whoever was here first, you want him?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Oh, Banner. I could pretend to be Tony, but I cannot pretend to be someone I’ve never met.’

Banner does not say anything. He does not even look at the Soldier, but at the neckline of his T-shirt. The Soldier is confused by this. He does not know what he sees on Banner’s face, whether it is sadness or neutrality or some kind of longing.

‘Do you want me to pretend to be Tony?’, the Soldier asks. He is not sure if he will be able to do it as completely as he did before, but he knows that Banner would not notice.

He leans in again, but Banner’s fingers press against his chest before their lips can touch. ‘I don’t know,’ Banner says. ‘I really don’t. Come on. You should eat something.’ He starts to get up, and the Soldier does, too, although he lingers in Banner’s space as they do.

They go up the stairs, to the empty kitchen. Banner digs through the cupboards. ‘I could heat up some more soup? Or do you think you can stomach solids?’

‘Soup,’ the Soldier says. He stands by the door as Banner pours a bowl of soup from a pot in the fridge and heats it up in the microwave. He listens, but they really do seem to be the only ones in the cottage.

Suddenly the Soldier feels disgusted with Banner, the idea of Banner, of being anywhere near him. He goes into the living room, strangely aware of his own breathing. ‘Would you want me to leave?’, the Soldier asks, loud enough for Banner to hear through the open door. ‘If there is someone here who was here all along, would you want for them to stay and for me to leave?’

For a long time there is only silence, although he can hear Bruce still moving around the kitchen. Stirring the soup once the microwave has beeped, then putting it back in for another twenty seconds and taking it out after that.

He comes into the living room and holds out the soup for the Soldier. ‘I wouldn’t.’

The Soldier takes the soup. He doesn’t know what to say. Banner’s answer is a surprise, one he doesn’t know what to do with.

‘I think there’s a chance that you’re always going to have to share your mind with others. Are you worried about that?’

‘No. But you should be.’

‘Why?’

‘Some of them are unstable.’

‘In what way?’

‘They want to survive, and they only know so many ways how to do that.’

Banner nods and sits on the worn down green couch in the middle of the living room. For some reason, all of the furniture is arranged in such a way that people sitting in any of it will have their back to at least one door or the window. The Soldier sits against the wall next to the small TV, opposite Banner’s couch. This way he can see both the door to the kitchen and the one to the hallway and also the window and the door on the far wall. Only the one thus far unexplored door is behind him.

The Soldier drinks his soup while Banner reads, this time from another book, a novel. Once the Soldier has finished his soup and set down his bowl, Banner stops and looks at him. ‘Do you want me to read aloud?’

The Soldier does not want anything, but he knows that Banner means to ask permission, so the Soldier nods.

Again Banner reads, this time a story the Soldier does not think he has heard before. He creeps closer to Banner, until he can lean against his legs. This way, he can only watch the door to the kitchen, but he can listen closely for dangers coming from the hallway or outside.

They spend hours like this, with the Soldier leaning his head against Banner’s knee, stroking Banner’s calf absent-mindedly while Banner holds his book in one hand and rests the other against the juncture of the Soldier’s shoulder and neck. The Soldier shivers, sometimes, and tries his best to hide the movement from Banner, afraid that he will stop touching him if he notices.

Once, he feels as if he is leaving the body, but it is not the same as other times. It feels closer to zoning out. He leaves, but no one takes his place, not even the body itself. For a while, he is uninhabited, but then Banner starts to massage his shoulder and he slowly comes back.

Banner stops reading when he gets to the end of the fourth chapter and for a while they just sit.

Eventually, the Soldier tilts his head up to look at Banner and breaks the silence. ‘I want to meet the green one.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘You have met all the people I am. I have only met half of who you are.’ The Soldier knows that this is how the real world, the one he sometimes has to pretend to be part of, works. In the real world, fairness, symmetry, balance, matters.

‘You can’t meet him. I’m still on the blood pressure medication.’

This surprises the Soldier. He himself would like to have his medication back, would even like to be wiped again, if only to have more freedom of movement in his own (but it’s not really his own, is it?) head. With the medication, he still had a head peopled by too many ghosts, but at least they were confined. At least the body only existed to endure pain, and the Soldier only existed to endure waiting and to coordinate his many roles, whom endured sex. They only came out to fulfil their roles, and only with the Soldier’s permission. Every person in his mind lived in its own little room, and the Soldier had the only key to each one. Now all doors are unlocked and all ghosts run free.

Banner, on the other hand has only one ghost, and it is not one meant to feel pain or to have sex or to assassinate. It is strong and unfeeling. It protects Banner, it shields him from pain and violence and death. It is the opposite of the Soldiers ghosts, who desert him and leave him to deal with everything all on his own. Banner’s green one takes over and deals with everything so Banner doesn’t have to. The Soldier cannot imagine choosing to carry all the weight on his own instead.

He sits very still, still leaning against Banner’s legs, but not sure if he still wants to. ‘Why do you still take the medication?’

‘Because I don’t want to hurt anyone.’

The Soldier thinks he would find it joyful, the thought of himself, so large and strong and impenetrable, able to swat away humans like flies. He would not be afraid the way Banner seems to be.

He stands and watches Banner’s face. ‘What if someone tried to hurt me?’

‘Natasha and Clint are both trained –‘

‘They aren’t here.’

‘I would do what I can.’

‘But you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t let him out.’

‘Tony, I can’t do that.’

Both of them go very still, unnaturally so, Banner because he realises his mistake, the Soldier because for the first time since this all started, he really, truly wants to kill Banner.

‘I am not – you forget that I am not him. He was a fake, Banner. He was who Ross thought you’d get attached to fastest.’

Banner tries to seem unaffected, but his eyes widen slightly at Ross’s name. His pupils grow smaller, his mouth won’t quite close. ‘You were working for him.’ He does not sound betrayed but defeated. At one point, the Soldier knows, one must accept that one’s freedom is an illusion, that life is ruled by one’s creator.

‘He hired me through an organisation that he believed to be American run, but that actually works with the Red Room. The Red Room simply assigned me to capture you. It was Ross who assigned me to seduce you first. Said you’d fall for me faster if someone hurt me like your daddy hurt you.’

Banner is quiet, jaw working, eyes distant like he’s no longer seeing the Soldier, though he’s sure Banner still hears him loud and clear. ‘He could hear every word. I wired everything on the first day. He had interns type up transcripts. Everything you told me, Ross heard.’ The Soldier has pried the recording device out of Banner’s glasses days ago. The clothes with the wires are all gone. The Soldier knows the Widow got rid of them. ‘He knows that he was right about you now. That you really are a pathetic little boy who wants to be loved by men because his daddy never loved him enough. But you couldn’t even get that right. Couldn’t even fall in love with someone real. You fell in love with someone pretending to be something they cannot even imagine. I did a shitty job, Banner, but you were so pathetic, so desperate, so lonely, that you just couldn’t help yourself, could you. Just a little bit of attention and you give up any sense of self-preservation you had.’

The Soldier could go on, but Banner stands from the couch and bolts for the door. He struggles with the lock and when he curses, his voice sounds lower, less human. He almost falls through the door when it finally swings open and stumbles forward, the movement coming out of his chest almost as if he’s about to throw up.

The Soldier follows him at a distance, and watches from the doorway as it happens. The sound of it is almost more impressive than the sight. Banner’s clothes tear, his joints pop and creak, he screams in pain and the sound warps into a roar so deafening the Soldier wants to cover his ears.

Banner grows, the color of his skin quickly turns from tan to murky grey to green. The Soldier is most surprised by this, the color. On the footage he had seen, it had looked artificial and bright, but in reality, the green man’s skin looks natural, beautiful, even, in a way.

The green man cuts off his roar and turns to the Soldier, but does not attack. For a long time, they stare at one another.

‘Banner angry,’ the green man says, then. He takes a step back, and a mine explodes. It is not a regular one. The Soldier knows where the Widow stole it from, recognises its contained explosion, that does not damage the cottage or the green man, but that would blow any human to bits and pieces. The green man does not even flinch, as if he stepped in a puddle instead of on a mine.

The Soldier nods. ‘That’s why you’re here, yes?’

To the Soldier’s surprise, the green man nods. As if he has a lot of calm, rational conversations, as if it is his purpose, his right, to behave like a man instead of a monster.

‘So what are you going to do?’ The Soldier feels almost… shy, he thinks. He has made Banner feel bad, horrible, even, although so many of the things he said were untrue, he has made the green man come out, but now he does not know what for. A minute ago, he felt justified in doing this, now he is not sure. He knows with certainty that Banner will be disappointed with him once he returns.

The green man watches him. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘You are puny. No threat to Banner.’

‘I could kill him,’ the Soldier says, because it is true.

‘No,’ the green man simply says. With a rumbling sigh, he sits in the grass in front of the cabin. Another mine explodes, and the green man huffs in annoyance. The Soldier carefully steps forward, but the green man seems unconcerned.

This is the first time the Soldier sees the outside of the cabin, but he takes it in almost unconsciously. It’s not all that important. There is a lake, beyond the booby traps, endless fields, stretched out over roiling hills, sheep dotted across the grass in the distance.

The sky is cloudy but bright and as the Soldier stands there, watching the green man watch a bird fly by. It starts to rain. The green man holds out his hand, catching the rain and studying the wetness on his palm. Thoughtfully, he brings it to his mouth and licks the water from his skin.

‘Where is Banner now?’, the Soldier asks. ‘Where does he go when you’re here?’

The green man frowns and scratches at the ground lightly. The scorched grass reveals dirt underneath. ‘Hulk is here.’

‘But Banner, where did he go?’

‘Not here.’ He touches his fingers to the side of his head. ‘Inside. Screaming.’

‘Why did he create you?’

‘To not be alone.’ The Soldier envies the green man for how easily, how confidently he gives this answer. It seems more important to the Soldier to have a purpose at all, and to know it, than to have a worthy purpose, or a noble one.

He sits down across from the green man, so close that he feels, if not scared, then at least endangered. At risk. ‘Why aren’t you angry at me?’

The green man looks up from the little hole he is digging in the earth by just scratching his finger across the grass a little. ‘Hulk not angry. Banner angry. Hulk help. Hulk smash.’

Thunder rumbles in the distance and the rain gets denser. Hulk sighs, although it doesn’t quite cover the way the thunder made him tense.

‘Where do you go, when Banner is in charge?’, the Soldier asks.

The green man keeps looking at the ground this time, even when he answers. ‘Hulk gone.’ There is something sad to his tone. In one gentle sweep of his hand, he pushes all the earth he dug up back into its hole. ‘Hulk buried,’ he says quietly. ‘No mind.’

The Soldier swallows, not sure what to say. The green man – Hulk – continues to pat the earth back to flatness. He carefully tears the topmost parts off the leaves of grass around the brown patch and pushes them into the dirt, as if this will make the grass he tore out return. The Soldier thinks this is sad, that the green man tries to fix the hole he made, while there are two small craters the mines made still open behind him.

The Soldier does not know how long they sit there, but eventually the rain stops, and another while after that, the Hulk shrinks down to Banner, his pants loose around his waist, his hair and skin drenched. He starts to shiver right away and struggles to get up, eyes focusing on the Soldier, who stands, too.

Banner moves his mouth as if to say something, but then he shakes his head and walks back to the cottage, leaving the Soldier to follow reluctantly.

Banner does not stomp around in his anger, he does not throw the door when he goes through a door the Soldier has not seen open before, into one of the ground floor bedrooms, he is gentle as he picks out clothes and a towel. But the Soldier can still tell that he is angry. There is something contained about him, like violence comes easy to him, like there is a wild thing under the surface ready to pounce at any moment.

The Soldier watches from the doorway as Banner dries his skin with a towel and gets dressed in clean clothes. He is methodical, almost careful in the way he moves. He ruffles the towel through his hair and the Soldier likes the way it curls messily, still half-wet.

Then, when Banner is done, he looks up at the Soldier with an expression that is… blank, empty. The Soldier feels the impulse to duck away from his gaze as if it were a bullet, but he stays still.

‘If you ever do that again, I’ll hand you over to the Red Room myself.’ His voice is steady. The Soldier does not doubt his sincerity.

The Soldier doesn’t say anything, not sure what there is to say.

‘He could have hurt you! He could have killed you!’ Even now, when Banner’s voice is loud and on the verge of cracking, his posture is unnaturally still, as if he’s afraid he will burst apart if he moves at all.

The Soldier again cannot think of anything to say. Banner makes his stomach feel cold and heavy. The Soldier feels angry at himself, but he does not know what for.

He leaves the room, walks through the hallway and down the stairs to the room where he slept the last few days. Banner does not follow him. The Soldier crawls under the blankets, feeling like he is hiding. Eventually, he falls asleep.

When he wakes, he sees that Banner is back in his spot in the doorway. This time he is not reading. He is asleep, chin resting against his chest, blanket wrapped around his shoulders. The Soldier sits on the edge of the bed and watches him. He knows that Banner will still be angry at him when he wakes and he does not want him to be. Carefully, afraid to wake Banner, he walks over to him and sits down beside him. When Banner continues to sleep, the Soldier lies down on the carpet and lays his head against Banner’s thigh. As an afterthought, he pulls Banner’s pliant hand towards him and holds it against the side of his neck.

He does not manage to find sleep again, so instead he listens to Banner’s breathing and feels his own pulse against Banner’s hand. There is something thrilling about this, about the thought of Banner feeling his heartbeat. The Soldier does not always consider himself to be alive – weapons do not live -, but now, with Banner as his witness, there is no denying it.

Banner awakes within the hour. He is fast to come to full awareness. His hand tightens slightly against the Soldier’s neck, until Banner recognises the feeling of skin. He looks down, pulling his hand away and the Soldier carefully moves away from him and into a sitting position. He hopes that Banner will not say anything, that he will not expect the Soldier to say things in return, but the Soldier knows this is unlikely.

‘Why do you keep –‘ Banner takes a deep breath, and repeats, ‘You keep - coming so _close_ to me. Kissing me, lying against me. Why would you do that?’

At least this is a question the Soldier can answer. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What if I want you to stop doing it? Would you?’

The Soldier frowns. That’s a harder question somehow, not because he doesn’t know the answer, but because he doesn’t want to consider it, doesn’t want to stop. ‘I would.’

Banner doesn’t say anything at that, but digs his fingers into the carpet not unlike Hulk dug his fingers into the earth not long ago.

‘Are you going to ask me to stop?’

Banner does not react to the question, and the Soldier almost repeats himself, but then Banner glances up and shakes his head.

The relief the Soldier feels at this confuses him, but what is even more worrying is how much he _wants_ all of a sudden to be close to Banner, now that he has at least some form of permission. ‘Can I – right now?’

Bruce nods and lets the Soldier crawl back into his space. The Soldier lets whatever desires are pushing into his mind take over, and gently pushes Banner to lie down so he can rest his head on his stomach. His stomach is noisy like a machine room. His heart beats loudly and steadily. Banner starts to stroke his hair without prompting and the Soldier is glad. The Soldier clenches Banner’s shirt.

‘I won’t try to get you to become Hulk again,’ he whispers.

For a while, Banner is quiet. ‘That’s not an apology.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the Soldier tries, unsure of what Banner expects him to say. He knows what an apology is, he knows what regret is, what remorse is, but he finds it hard to apply those concepts to himself. Every single one of those things requires one to make their own choices. The Soldier is not supposed to choose anything other than his watch.

‘That’s not an apology, either,’ Banner says, but he continues to stroke the Soldier’s hair.

At some point, because Banner insists he does not want to waste the entire day, they move to the green couch in the living room and Banner reads psychology books while the Soldier leans against his shoulder and traces patterns on his chest.

‘You have scars,’ he says. ‘I saw, when you changed back from Hulk.’

‘Yeah,’ Banner says. The Soldier can tell that’s where he wants the conversation to end. ‘I do.’

‘I do, too,’ the Soldier says. He knows that he has Banner’s attention with that. ‘I don’t remember how I got most of them, but they’re there.’

‘Do they hurt?’

‘Only the big ones.’ ‘Do yours hurt?’

‘They do when I change. Like all of my skin is stretching to accommodate for – for the Hulk, except the scars.’

For a while, they’re both quiet.

‘I forgot,’ Bruce says then. He falls silent again, and the Soldier thinks he won’t continue, but then he does. ‘The weapon inside your palm, does that hurt, too?’

‘Yes,’ the Soldier says.

‘Does it hurt right now?’

‘Yes.’ It always does. The Soldier is barely even aware of it anymore.

‘How is it – how is it attached? Do you think it could be removed? Would you want that?’

The Soldier takes a moment to mull that over. ‘I’d let you try, but I think that there will be fail safes. The Red Room did not want their technology to fall into anyone else’s hands.’

‘Maybe if Natasha and Clint find some files on you, we can learn more about it, yeah?’

The Soldier nods against Banner’s shoulder.

‘Clint called. He’s on his way back, should get here tomorrow, but Natasha is headed to the US to chase another lead.’

‘I do not think they will find anything. I was always with the Red Room.’

‘But then – you wouldn’t be the American, right, if you were born in Russia?’

‘I thought… maybe one of the Black Widows was impregnated by an America mission.’ The idea that he was anything else, that there is anyone other than the Red Room he has to thank for his life, makes him uncomfortable. He does not know much about parents, but he knows a little, from the many missions he prepared. Even for Banner, he learned about parents, about how it hurts when they die, when they take their anger out on you. He thinks that the Red Room might be like a parent to him. He does not know if it is supposed to hurt if a parent turns out not to be your true parent, but he thinks it will, for him. The thought that he might have had other parents, other creators, and that they were not there, scares him.

‘I don’t know,’ Banner says. ‘I don’t know what to even hope for in this situation. Would you feel better about that, if your dad was an American killed by the Red Room and your mother was in the same situation as you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You would.’

‘I want them to have had me from the beginning.’

‘Why?’

‘Because… this is what parents are, yes? They have you from the beginning, they give you shape? I want no one else to have given me shape. And I want no never have existed in a time where they did not have me.’

‘Do you love them… like a parent, the people from the Red Room?’

‘I don’t think I’m capable of such love. But I am loyal to them like a child. The way you were loyal to your father.’

Banner is quiet for a long time, distracted by memories the Soldier read about in a file what feels like a lifetime ago. ‘Why don’t you go back to them?’

‘Because I do not think I would survive, this time. They would dismantle me and then destroy every part. They do not want their technology to fall into anyone else’s hands.’

‘So you’re with us because the alternative is death?’

‘Yes. I know you will not kill me. And that the Widow and her plaything will only try so hard. I could incapacitate her long enough to run, even if I cannot kill her.’

‘What if… what if there was another option, would you leave?’

‘I have five thousand dollars, don’t I. I could leave anytime I want.’

‘Why haven’t you?’

‘I don’t know.’ He is quiet for a while, waiting for Banner to continue. When he does not and the Soldier feels that the conversation is over, he tilts up his head to look at Banner. ‘Kiss me,’ he says.

Banner does.

The man with his impractical bow and arrow returns early and finds Banner and the Soldier leaned against each other on the couch. They have had dinner made by Banner – rice with canned chickpeas and canned tomatoes with bouillon cubes and a spice mix that was not quite what Banner had hoped – and Banner has resumed reading, while the Soldier has resumed being quiet and pressed up against him.

Clint is clearly tired. The Soldier wonders what his last name is, uncomfortable that he does not know this man, has not read any files on him, and that he has to call him by his first name as if he is attached to him.

‘I’m gonna go shower,’ Clint mumbles and he disappears into the fifth door in the living room, the upstairs bathroom, for half an hour.

Banner seems self-conscious because of his arrival, and removes the arm he had draped around the Soldier’s shoulder hours ago. The Soldier already misses his fingers tangled in his hair, the gentle pressure on his scalp.

The Soldier refuses to budge until Banner tells him outright and presses kisses to Banner’s chest, wanting, irrationally, to be pushed away, to be told by Banner how ashamed Banner is that he let the Soldier seduce him. He wants it as much as he wanted to meet the Hulk and again, he gets what he wants.

Banner leans back, hand on the Soldier’s upper arm. ‘Cut that out,’ he says. ‘You’ve been clinging to me for hours, haven’t you had enough by now?’

The Soldier continues to kiss him, up to his neck, his jaw, his lips, and once Banner kisses him back, almost automatically, the Soldier pulls back and retreats to an armchair.

Clint returns from his shower and eats cold leftovers straight out of the pot, perched on the back of Banner’s couch. They watch TV, for the first time in all the time the Soldier has been upstairs. There are only British channels, and so they watch a domestic political crisis unfold in the news. Something minor that Margaret Tatcher is praised for handling well.

Clint does not seem to like Tatcher and grumbles about her around bites of food while Banner looks up from his book distractedly. He is still reading about psychology, as if it will give him any kind of insight into the Soldier’s brain.

The Soldier decides to sleep, although he has done quite a lot of that already. He likes to sleep, he finds. He likes it especially when he knows Banner is there. He does not know why.

-

Clint does not like to stay in the cottage and busies himself by pacing around, eating crackers and calling a man named Coulson on the phone. He does not sleep as much as people are supposed to, in the Soldier’s experience, and even when he does sleep, it is in two or three hour intervals on the couch, never in a bed. He seems to always be around, which the Soldier does not like. When Clint is around, Banner does not stand close to him and withdraws when the Soldier reaches out.

Banner has his own bedroom on the ground floor and is reluctant to let the Soldier into it while he is getting ready to sleep. He is even more reluctant to follow the Soldier to his bedroom in the basement. When he finally does, it is with uncomfortable glances to the stairs, where Clint is, and with promises to the Soldier that Banner will not stay long, that he will not let the Soldier kiss him.

And so the Soldier does not kiss him, simply stares up at him as he strips to his underwear and lies down in bed.

‘I’ve missed you,’ the Soldier says. ‘Don’t you miss me? Don’t you miss my skin?’

Banner is quiet, but does not look away from the Soldier. ‘I shouldn’t,’ he says.

‘Because Clint is here? Do you not think he is sleeping with the Widow?’

Again Banner is silent, unmoving. Until finally, he opens his mouth to speak, still silent, and steps forward, joining the Soldier in the bed, allowing him to burrow like an animal looking for warmth against Banner’s chest.

Banner does not allow this to happen every night. Sometimes his shame wins out and he stays upstairs, feeling miserable in his empty bed.

‘It’s okay,’ Clint tells him one day, when Banner and him are in the living room and they both believe the Soldier is still in his bed downstairs, although he has actually reached the top of the stairs and is only a few feet away from them, hidden from sight by a door left ajar.

This is not the first thing Clint has said to Banner this morning, the Soldier can tell, but he can imagine how their conversation started, with Banner glancing guiltily at the door to the basement stairs and Clint deciding he has finally had enough of that bullshit.

‘It’s not,’ Banner says. ‘Best case scenario, he’s taking advantage of me. Worst case, I’m taking advantage of him.’

‘You know he’s taking advantage of you, though. He believes that you loving him protects him, which it does, so he wants to keep that going. I don’t think you’re taking advantage of him.’

‘I do. He doesn’t know any better than this. He doesn’t have any other options. Only reason he’s here is because that’s how things happened to turn out. Only reason he wants to be with me is because he thinks it’s the only way to survive. It’s like that – that Stockholm syndrome, you know? I know that’s the only reason he wants to be around me, but I want to be around him, too, so I let him.’

‘That doesn’t make you a bad person, Bruce.’

‘It does! Of course it does!’

‘So what would a good person do?’

‘A good person would – would…’ The Soldier can imagine Banner, whose hair is getting long again, running a hand though his floppy curls in frustration. ‘A good person would have left when he asked them to. A good person would have made clear to him that they’d – they’d protect him no matter what. No matter if he kisses them or not. A good person wouldn’t keep this whole thing going for as long as I have. A good person would never have been in this situation in the first place because a good person wouldn’t decide to build a bomb just to get their research funded.’

‘Did he ask you to leave?’

‘Yeah. At the start of all this, when his meds were still working.’

‘Why did he want you to leave?’

‘I… he said I’d remind him too much of who he was supposed to be for his mission. I’d just confuse him.’

‘Has he seemed confused, since?’

‘No. Not since he went off the medication.’

Clint does not say anything. The Soldier imagines he nodded.

‘Was it this easy with Natasha? Was she this normal?’

For a while longer, Clint is silent. ‘No. She was violent, at this point. Locked up the whole cabin and she still got out at least twice a week. Tore apart the whole inside. One time, she stabbed me. She always used violence against me, but that’s the first time she had an actual weapon. I needed blood transfusions and everything.’

‘How did you get blood transfusions out here?’

‘She drove me to the hospital. Helped stop the bleeding along the way.’

‘She could have escaped.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe that was Stockholm syndrome, too. Maybe she just figured I’d help keep her alive. Maybe she actually gave a fuck. I’m supposed to make this into some lesson about how things with your guy are gonna turn out alright, don’t I? Well, I got nothing. He’s different from Natasha. He’s calm, but I got a feeling it’s the calm before the storm kind of calm. The Red Room’s good at fucking people up. They wouldn’t make unfucking people this easy.’

‘So you think that he’s just – what? – going to break all of a sudden, out of nowhere?’

‘Yes. That’s exactly what I think. Maybe the meds aren’t out of his system yet. Maybe there’s something in his brain that the Red Room maintained and that’s wearing off now. I don’t know how any of this works, either, but I know it’s supposed to be a lot harder than this.’

For a while there is silence, the gentle clinking of dishes from the kitchen. Clint brought eggs when he got back, and the Soldier can hear someone fry three in a pan. He’s pretty sure it’s Banner.

‘Clint,’ Banner says then, and his voice is indeed coming from further into the cottage, the kitchen. ‘There’s something else you should know. While you were gone, Tony said he wanted to see the Hulk, and I said no, of course, but he managed to get me angry and I, um, Hulked-out.’

‘You did?’

‘Yeah. So the blood pressure medication doesn’t actually work.’

‘When was this? How did you not tear apart the whole cabin?.’

‘I ran outside. I don’t actually know what happened after that. I, um, I wasn’t actually there. But I closed up the craters the mines left, that’s why the grass is gone out in front of the door. I made it clear to Tony that this couldn’t happen again, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to keep using it against me.’

The Soldier feels anger pulse inside his chest, both because Banner is ratting him out to Clint and because he keeps using that _name_ , the one the Soldier wanted to keep, but that never belonged to him in the first place.

He returns to the basement as Banner and Clint continue to speak, reassuring each other as dumb humans always do. _You’re so much better at this than I am_ and _you’re doing what you can_.

He sulks in his bed until Banner comes to find him with a plate of eggs, beef jerkey, beans and crackers. He ignores Banner, but eats the food, leaned against the headboard while Banner puts one knee on the foot of the bed, as if he isn’t sure he’s welcome.

For a while they don’t speak. The Soldier looks at his food, Banner looks at the Soldier.

The Soldier sets the empty plate on the night stand and stares at his hands in his lap. Banner is still looking at him.

‘You are taking advantage of me,’ the Soldier says. His cheeks feel warm, but his chest feels cold. Banner has not taken the blood pressure medication since the Soldier coaxed the green man to the surface. Even if he could still control himself as much as he could with the medication, the green man came out seven seconds after Banner ran from the couch. There is no way to get out of the cottage from the basement in seven seconds or less.

‘You are disgusting. You see someone who is vulnerable, who is forced to seduce you, who does not even have a mind of their own and you want to fuck them. Don’t you Banner, you want to fuck me. Even though I cannot want you. You don’t care about that. You want me. That is all that matters to you. That is why you have been trying to fuck me since you met me. Biding your time. Until I am vulnerable enough. Until you can take advantage of me. Like the dirty, pathetic _freak_ that you are. If I had a choice, I would not want someone who is so ugly on the inside, who only wants to hurt me and abuse me, who wants to see me cry and squirm and gets off on my pain, who –‘

Banner runs, shoulders hunched and chest heaving as if he has to throw up. He shouts, his voice so deep that the floor trembles. Banner gets upstairs and the Soldier can hear the couch creak, can hear Clint’s voice, trying to calm someone who is beyond help now.

The Soldier stays in the basement, breathing heavily. He does not hear walls crumble or furniture break. He does not hear Clint cry out in agony.

When he finally goes up the stairs, the cottage is empty and the front door is open. The Soldier’s hands are trembling. He clasps them together to make it stop.

Banner is kneeling in the dirt, where the craters from the mines are indeed filled up, skin still its usual tan, clothes intact. Clint is crouched beside him, grasping Banner’s upper arm in a way the Soldier detests. It seems almost affectionate.

Neither of them is speaking, but they are looking into each other’s eyes. Clint is murmuring, ‘steady, steady, there you go.’

Banner finally looks away and wipes his mouth, as if he really did throw up. ‘I have to leave,’ he says. ‘I can go to India. I know a bit of Marathi. My grandparents are from the north. I think my aunt still lives there. The Army won’t look for me there. Not for a while. I’d have enough time to disappear.’

‘I don’t think that’s gonna do anyone any good. Least of all the Winter Soldier.’

‘It’s not doing him any good that I’m here, either.’

‘I’m not so sure about that. I think he’s better off with you here.’

‘I think I’m helping him hold on to who he was.’

‘Let’s just get back inside, okay? We’ll figure this out later. I’ll get some coffee going.’

The Soldier retreats to the basement before they come back into the cabin and see him. He feels as if he did the wrong thing. The kind of thing that warrants punishment.

No one comes for him the entire day and he does not go looking for anyone, either. He sleeps and reads the book Banner left, the one he read to the Soldier in the living room.

He misses Banner, but Banner does not come. When he wakes up, there is a plate of stew on his nightstand, but he imagines Clint brought it, not Banner.

He eats and reads and then he exercises. Normally, he administers his medication at this point, but now he mimes the movements, folding his fingers as if around a syringe, stretching his arm and finding the track-marked vein. He pretends that he feels it, the ache all over. He squeezes his arms and legs until they start to bruise, but it is not the same. He goes to sleep.

He dreams that his hands are bound and a man is fucking him. He does not know the man’s name, does not recognise his face, but the man calls him Howard. The man twists his skin and squeezes his limbs until Howard screams. There is the sound of a bone snapping, but Howard does not feel it. He screams and screams, but it does not hurt. The man continues to fuck him and kisses Howard’s neck. His teeth are so sharp that when they brush against Howard’s skin, they leave gashes that bleed profusely. He bleeds and bleeds, and the man continues to fuck him. Then the man is gone and he still bleeds, in every place the man touched him. He bleeds as if he is filled with only blood, nothing else. The bed is not soaked, his skin does not get wet with blood. The blood leaves him and disappears, and eventually he has bled so much that he is empty, that he is only skin. Howards wishes for the blood back, for the man back, so that he can be filled once more, but he lies there, looking at the ceiling of the room in the basement, unable to move his empty arms and his empty legs, unable to breathe through his empty chest, until finally, the Soldier wakes up, the empty feeling not quite gone.

He lies there, still not moving, although he knows he can, now, and wonders if he could get Banner to fuck him, to fill him. He thinks that it will be harder than getting him to turn into the green man, and that it will make the Soldier feel more guilt, as well.

He goes upstairs, where Clint is asleep on the couch. Banner is not in the living room, but the door to his bedroom is closed. The Soldier opens it. The room is dark, although the curtains aren’t fully drawn, and Banner is sitting on the edge of the bed.

He does not look up when the Soldier closes the door behind himself. He looks strange, like a child and a beast in the same body. Something more than human and not human all at once. The Soldier knows he has killed children who looked like this, who lived in horrible places and did not flinch when he pointed his gun.

He steps forward, until he reaches the bed, and puts one knee on the mattress at the foot of the bed, a request for permission.

Banner glances up at him, then back at his lap, where his hands are. ‘I want you to stop touching me,’ he says. 

The Soldier does not want this. He wants to take Banner in his arms and never let go. He wants to open up his skin, push Banner inside and sow himself back up, to have Banner as close as possible forever. He thinks maybe this will help, will bring him back to how he used to be, calm and unfeeling, unwanting. 

Despite this, he does not touch Banner. He thinks maybe if he does, Banner will fall from this edge he is on, this edge between child and beast, and either option will be his end, something he will be unable to return from.

‘Do you still dream of your father?’, The Soldier asks.

‘Yes. But those are not the worst dreams.’

‘What are the worst dreams?’

‘The ones where he is not there. Where _I_ kill her.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the Soldier says, because this is what people say when they can’t do anything else.

‘I dreamt that I killed you, too,’ Banner says. ‘That you killed my mother, and then you raped me, and I bashed in your head. I enjoyed it, in the dream. Because I felt like nothing bad would happen to me again, after I killed you.’

The Soldier does not say anything. He does not think he would mind as much, if Banner killed him. It would not be the same as if someone else killed him. Banner would be kind about it, gentle.

‘Would you kill me,’ Banner asks. ‘If it meant no one would ever hurt you again?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But I know you would not die.’ He thinks this is a lie. He would not be able to kill Banner.

‘I don’t think I would kill you, in real life. I wanted to in the dream, but that’s different. In dreams I want a lot of things.’

‘Like what?’

‘I want you to touch me.’

‘But not in real life.’

‘No. In real life, the thought makes me feel sick.’

The Soldier does not say anything, but walks to the other side of the bed and crawls under the covers, leaving a lot of space between himself and Banner.

Banner stays sitting at the edge of the bed for a while, but eventually he lies back down, tugging at the covers until he is comfortable. Neither of them manages to fall asleep in the next few hours. Only when a beam of sunlight touches Banner’s face through the window, past the half-drawn curtains, does Banner finally sleep.

The Soldier watches him. He imagines Banner trying to kill him, but he cannot. He imagines Banner fucking him, but his face turns into that of the man from his dream. He imagines Banner filling him, until his deflated skin is stuffed once again, comfortably tight around flesh and bone. This he can imagine, although it does not feel like fucking, in his mind.

Banner’s mouth is soft as he sleeps, his cheeks are soft, his nails, where his fingers grab his pillow, look soft. The Soldier wants to touch him, to feel his fingers sink in as if Banner is filled with feathers, but he does not. He watches, and then, when he hears Clint stir in the other room, he waits.

When Clint quickly peeks into the door to see if Banner is there, the Soldier pretends to be asleep. He lies close to Banner, so that it seems to Clint as if they are touching under the blanket.

Clint does not seem to mind this, for he does not do anything about it, and returns to the living room after only a few seconds.

The Soldier moves back, out of Banner’s space and resumes watching him. His breathing changes when he wakes up, and the muscles in his face twitch. He stays on his side, blinking slowly, and watches the Soldier.

‘I told you about my dream tonight, that part wasn’t a dream, right?’

The Soldier shakes his head.

‘I’m sorry. That was… inappropriate.’

The Soldier shakes his head again. 

‘My father never raped me.’

The Soldier nods. This was in Banner’s file as well.

‘I don’t know why I dreamt that part.’

The Soldier does not say anything. He does not know, either. Maybe Banner is scared the Soldier will rape him. The Soldier feels guilty about this, although he has done nothing wrong. He decides that he will never have sex with Banner, even if Banner says that he wants to.

For a long time, they look at one another. Then, finally, the Soldier gets out of bed and leaves the room. Banner does not follow, although the Soldier can hear the sheets rustle as he stands.

He finds Clint in the kitchen, reading a piece of paper scribbled full to the margins at the kitchen table. He looks up and nods at the Soldier in greeting. This feels strange, a human greeting for something that is not supposed to be treated as such.

‘The Cho lady called with some information about the drugs you were on.’ He holds out the piece of paper. ‘Do you want to read it?’, he asks.

The Soldier shakes his head. He must have a wide array of knowledge. He must know everything a regular human boy knows and he must know everything a spy knows and everything an assassin knows and everything a whore knows. He must know and know and know, but he mustn’t know this. He mustn’t know how he was made, A weapon does not know what parts it consists of, what rounds and what oil it requires. It only needs to know how to fire.

Clint puts down the piece of paper and grabs a newspaper that was also lying on the table, skipping ahead to the crossword and getting to work.

He sits at the table with Clint because he does not know what else to do. Eventually he takes a piece of paper from beneath the one already scribbled full, carefully tears off a square and scribbles down the words – his words, the only thing he is always allowed to remember, this is how to fire the weapon, how to fire him – first in Cyrillic, then in phonetically written Russian, so that Banner will know how to pronounce them. Above the words, he writes, if you feel unsafe, say this and tell me to stop. 

He stands, goes to Banner’s room and carefully slides the piece of paper under the door. Then he returns to the kitchen, where Clint is biting on the back of his pencil and counting out the letters of an unimportant word. The Soldier sits and waits.

For a long time, things are silent. The Soldier imagines Banner in the other room, getting dressed, combing through his hair with his fingers, touching his own face as if it feels like it will come undone, like he will have to glue it back in place soon.

‘You know,’ Clint says. He has put down his pencil, crossword half-filled out. ‘I’m surprised at how well Bruce is dealing with all this. Are you surprised, too?’

The Soldier nods. Missions always break, but so far, Banner has only bent and then bent right back into shape.

‘For your own good, don’t break him, okay? I think it would get a lot uglier than either of us first anticipated.’

The Soldier nods. He thinks that now he knows how to break Banner, Banner has told him how. But he does not want to. He wants to hurt anyone who would do that to Banner, himself included.

Clint is looking at him, and speaks again. ‘It says right here that the medication might have encouraged violent tendencies in you that you don’t usually have. I think that’s strange. That would mean that they didn’t train you to be violent. That they had to chemically induce that.’

The Soldier does not remember, but he has caught glimpses of the body’s memories, of men in lab coats encouraging it to fight back while it screamed in pain. It never fought back, not that it remembers. But it must have, at some point, or they would have destroyed it for its uselessness.

‘Do you feel violent right now? Is it really gone with the drugs?’

The Soldier finds it hard to distinguish himself now, empty of medication, from who he was when he was on them. He feels the same. He wants to be the same, but he is not sure he is. He thinks that perhaps, he would be able to kill Banner if he was still taking the medication, but now, he is not.

He shakes his head, then nods to answer both of Clint’s questions.

‘But you still try to get Banner to self-destruct.’

The Soldier nods, because although he was curious to meet the green man, he also wanted to hurt Banner by making him lose control.

‘Why?’

The Soldier shrugs. He does not want to talk anymore. He does not want to say things and he does not want to hear things. When people say things, they say the wrong things. And the Soldier says the wrongest things of all. That is why Banner dreamt that the Soldier would rape him and why he said that he does not want the Soldier to touch him anymore. Because the Soldier does everything wrong.

They sit in silence, even when Banner wanders into the living room and turns on the TV, the volume so loud that the Soldier thinks he could hear the TV even when standing outside the cottage. Clint finishes his crossword, but even after that, he stays in the kitchen, as if somehow, to both of them, it is clear that Banner’s noisy TV is to be interpreted as a plea for space.

Only when the Soldier can hear the shower running does he leave the kitchen, carefully, as if he might startle Banner in the bathroom. The TV is still on and Clint, who followed the Soldier, turns the volume down almost by half. On the screen are reruns of a soccer match, the commentator shouting each time either team gets near the other team’s goal.

The Soldier thinks of Banner in the shower, hands shaking, pressing against his eyes to try and alleviate the pressure there, but then he forces himself to stop thinking of it. Thinking of Banner naked is rude, and something he should never do without Banner’s permission. Even if he had his permission, he would not do it.

He goes to the basement, pretends to administer his medication, squeezes his limbs until they hurt and tries to go to sleep. If he listens very closely, he can hear Banner in the shower, the way the stream of the water is disrupted by his movements. He can hear the water turn off and then, a few minutes later, he can hear the bathroom door open. Banner and Clint speak in quiet murmurs and the TV stays turned on. Clint comes down to the basement and sleeps in the second bedroom there, keeping it locked the entire time. The TV stays turned on for ten hours before the Soldier finally goes to check if Banner fell asleep or not. He did not and is sitting on the floor, leaning against the couch behind him, a pillow hugged against his stomach. The Soldier watches him for a while, but still does not speak. Banner’s shoulders are shaking and his breathing is uneven. The Soldier thinks maybe he is trying to cry. Banner pours himself another cup of coffee from the pot on the coffee table with trembling hands and gulps it down as if he wants to choke on it. Watching him makes the Soldier’s lungs feel tight and so he leaves for his bedroom again.

This time he does manage to sleep, and again he dreams that a man fucks him. This man is younger, sleeker, more beautiful than the one from last time, and he calls the Soldier Anthony. Every time he puts his hand on the Soldier, it opens up a hand-shaped hole in his skin through which he bleeds. There is a hole in his upper arm, on his chest, on his cheek, over his collarbone. The man begs him not to go, whispers ‘Anthony, Anthony,’ and Anthony does not go, but he runs empty and the man disappears. The holes heal, but the blood does not return, and again Anthony is empty skin, unable to move, until the Soldier finally wakes up.

He reads for a couple of hours. The TV is still on upstairs. It does not turn off even when the Soldier has spent hours reading and exercising and has gone to sleep again.

The third time he dreams of being fucked, he is louder, more active. He tugs the man closer, kisses his lips. He is called Anthony again, he knows, although the man calls him Sanja. ‘Yes, yes, please,’ he says. ‘You feel so good. So good.’ The man smiles and strokes Anthony. ‘Yes, yes,’ Anthony says, as he can feel the blood leaving him again, through every pore in his body. He feels as if his skin has become translucent and light comes pouring out, but really it is blood, leaving him empty. ‘Yes, please, bleed me dry, bleed me empty.’ The man kisses him and Anthony arches his back. ‘It feels so good. Empty me, please.’ The man disappears and Anthony is just skin, just something that is not supposed to be empty, but is. For a long time, he lies there and no one wakes up at all.

Eventually the Soldier finds his way back from sleep. He still feels empty, so empty it is more akin to hurt than anything else. He goes upstairs, where the TV is still on. He thinks it has gotten louder since he fell asleep. Banner is still awake. Judging from his shaking hands, he has not slept at all since turning on the TV now over a day ago. The Soldier does not know where Clint is, but it does not matter.

He sits on the couch, on the other side of where Banner is still leaning against it. He knows Banner must have noticed, but Banner does not acknowledge him. He does not try to hide the piece of paper the Soldier slid under his door, now clenched in his fist as if it makes him feels safe. On TV people dressed in medieval costumes shout at each other about marriage. The movie ends and another begins, but The Soldier does not care. Banner is slumped down in a way that clearly indicates sleep and the Soldier feels relieved. He hopes that when Banner wakes up, he will no longer be grumpy and quiet.

Clint wanders in later, from the kitchen with a handful of crackers. He sees that Banner is asleep and says ‘Oh, good.’

The Soldier ignores him and Clint goes back down to the basement.

Five hours later, the morning news comes on and six minutes into that, the phone starts to ring in the kitchen. Banner startles awake and goes to pick it up.

‘Natasha,’ he says and the Soldier hates that he sounds relieved to hear her. 

‘Yeah, we’re good. Everything is still in one piece. How about you?’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Is that good news, or –‘

‘Yeah. He’s not going to like that. You’re gonna need a lot of proof.’

‘Shit. That’s more fucked up than I expected, somehow.’

‘But that does mean the damage can’t be as bad as we anticipated, right?’

‘Yeah, you’re right. When will you get back?’

‘Okay. Stay safe.’

Banner stays in the kitchen and the Soldier knows he is reading the notes on the Soldier’s medication. He has not read them yet, was too lost in his little quiet, passive spell.

He waits in the living room. Banner takes almost an hour and then he dials a number on the phone.

‘Helen, hey. I’m sorry to bother you. I wanted to thank you for analysing the drug. That’s so much more information than I could have hoped for.’

‘Just one question. Are you sure, that part, the chelation therapy, are you sure?’

‘Shit. He told me, that he needed the medication to counteract poisoning and I… I fucking forgot about it until now. God.’ The Soldier can hear the sigh in Banner’s voice, knows that he’s rubbing his face the way he sometimes does when he’s frustrated. He feels ashamed, like he did something wrong, but he isn’t sure what.

‘Heavy metal poisoning, do you know how long that takes?’

‘I must be a pretty high dosage, considering the amount of chelating medicine they were giving him.’

‘Yeah, shit. Okay, so that’s the early onset symptoms?’

‘It has to be. He wouldn’t be able to hide it this well if it had already progressed, right?’

‘Seriously, Helen, thank you so much. I owe you big time.’

‘Yeah. Thank you. Bye.’

It’s another ten minutes before Banner returns from the kitchen. ‘Hey, um…’ He falters. ‘I’m sorry, I still don’t know what to call you.’

‘Soldier is good,’ the Soldier says. It feels like the sentence sticks in his throat and it’s hard to swallow, but it is the correct thing to say. This is what he is, after all, it is the thing he should be called.

‘Soldier, I need to examine you. What you said about the – how the wires are poisoning you and the medicine counteracted that, that might be true.’

The Soldier does not remember saying this, but he nods, stands and starts to strip.

Banner looks pained. ‘Maybe not here,’ he says, then looks around, at a loss for a more appropriate place. ‘The bathroom has better light,’ he says weakly and so the Soldier, fully naked, heads for the bathroom. 

He has pretended, before, to be self-conscious about his body. He does not remember when or for whom, but he has hidden it in shame or modesty, he has shied away when people reached for it. Now he feels nothing. Banner follows him into the bathroom and slowly reaches for his hand, treating the Soldier as if he _is_ uncomfortable with being naked. The only one here who is, is Banner himself. ‘You, um, really you can keep your pants on,’ he says, not unkindly.

The Soldier goes to retrieve his pants and pulls them back on, then returns to his exact position, shoulders relaxed, arm loosely in Banner’s grip.

Banner pauses when he sees the cast. ‘Have you experienced any dizziness? Have you been unusually tired? Nauseous?’

The Soldiers knows these questions and knows that they can be answered incorrectly. The body remembers this, that some days being tired, being sick, comes with punishment, and other days withholding that information is what it is punished for.

‘No,’ the Soldier whispers. He cannot imagine Banner punishing him, cannot imagine Banner twisting a knife in his stomach or holding an electrical rod to his thigh until he smells scorched skin. He does not want to find out what he looks like, impassive and almost tender as he adds another scar to the Soldier’s skin.

‘Anything else? Do you feel like you’re running a fever? Have you had to throw up, or been unable to eat at all?’

The Soldier shakes his head. ‘You can take the entire cast off. I heal at an accelerated pace. The bone has already mended itself back together.’

Banner looks at him. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

And so Banner goes to find scissors and a serrated knife and clumsily but efficiently removes the cast. Once it comes off he is distracted from asking his questions by the Soldier’s hand, more damaged, more ruined than it was before. Banner traces his fingers over the dark veins haloing the repulsor and sprouting from the wires around it.

‘There must have been something,’ Banner says quietly. The horror in his voice is palpable. The Soldier knows for sure that he answered Banner’s questions incorrectly. ‘You can’t be this sick without any symptoms.’

‘I have slept for forty five of the last sixty one hours. On missions I can go without sleep for thirty hours with ease.’

Banner nods. The answer is correct. ‘Anything else?’

‘I haven’t eaten in seventy eight hours.’

‘Are you hungry?’

The Soldier shakes his head. ‘Food repels me.’

‘You should tell me when stuff like this happens.’

‘I attributed it to the loss of my medication.’

Banner nods, looking pinched. ‘I’m so sorry, Soldier,’ Banner says. The Soldier finds that he does not like to hear this name from Banner’s lips, that it makes him feel small and mute and dying like a bug under a magnifying glass. ‘I should have remembered this. I should never have let it come as far as it has.’

He turns back to the Soldier’s hand, gently presses the skin over the dark veins. ‘This is really bad,’ he mumbles. ‘What do you think would happen if we tried to take out the repulsor and the wires?’

The Soldiers thinks about this for a moment. ‘It does not matter, even if they can be removed, the reactor cannot.’

‘The reactor?’

The Soldier taps his chest and it makes a muffled, hollow sound. ‘There is a reactor under here.’

‘Can I see it?’

Peeling of the fake scarring is not easy. Avoiding the Soldier unnecessary pain was never a concern for the Red Room technicians had to worry about and so the adherent of the fake scars sticks to his skin stubbornly. It feels like his skin would rather come loose than let go of the fake scars and so he pulls harder.

‘Wait, stop,’ Banner says. He is so weak that he cannot even stand to watch another endure discomfort. ‘We could cut the rest away with scissors, okay?’

The Soldier waits while Banner finds scissors (he insists the ones he used for the Soldier’s cast are too unsafe). He is so careful as he cuts the synthetic scarring loose. He leaves the bits that would hurt to be pulled away from the Soldier’s skin, only cuts away as much as he needs to see the skin around the reactor. It has the same dark veins as the repulsor does.

‘Shit,’ Banner says. ‘This is poisoning you from the centre on out. And we can’t remove it. How deep does this thing go?’

The Soldier shrugs. ‘Sometimes, they take it out for maintenance. That way you can look how deep.’

‘Is it safe to take out?’

‘Only for fifteen minutes.’

‘What do you mean? What does it do after fifteen minutes?’

‘After fifteen minutes I can no longer be resuscitated.’

‘This is… like a pacemaker or something?’

‘I don’t know,’ the Soldier says. It is not the weapon’s job to know its own design.

‘What does it feel like when they take it out?’

‘My chest hurts and I can no longer breathe.’

‘Sounds like cardiac arrest.’

The Soldier would not know and waits for Banner to conclude his examination. Banner traces his fingers around the edge of the reactor, where the scars are thickest, so thick that the Soldier barely even registers the touch.

‘I don’t get how your body didn’t reject this.’

The Soldier knows the body remembers, remembers rejecting the thing keeping its heart beating, but it guards its memories from the Soldier. It knows pain is better forgotten.

‘The woman you talked to on the phone,’ the Soldier says instead, wanting Banner to stop inspecting him, to stop touching his skin in such an empty, clinical way. It is nothing like the way he used to touch the Soldier when he still dared. ‘Helen Cho, right?’

Banner nods.

‘I did research on her, for this mission. And on her girlfriend.’

‘Jane Foster?’

‘Yes.’

He remembers their pictures, their short biographies, both from the south, promising in their fields. Cho was offered a military contract and refused in favour of continuing her research at Caltech. Foster had already graduated and seemed torn between a teaching position and private sector research. Banner knows Cho through classes. They were fairly good friends, had plans to move in together after college, before Cho met Foster. Even after, she wanted Banner to move in with them, but Banner no longer wanted to. ‘Are they okay?’

‘Yeah, I think so. They moved in together not long ago.’

The Soldier nods earnestly. It is endearing that Banner thinks he does not know this. ‘Do they love each other?’

Banner almost smiles. ‘Yes.’

‘Would you have moved in with me, if we could have?’, the Soldier asks. He is not Tony, he is the Soldier pretending to be Tony. He knows it is not the same, but he thinks Banner will not. 

There is a pause while Banner processes the softer voice, the change in the Soldier’s posture. He is no longer as rigid, mellows his muscles as if he grew up in a house, where he was safe, with people who loved him and kissed his forehead before he went to sleep. 

‘We live together right now,’ Banner says and he sounds careful. He hands the Soldier his shirt and the Soldier pulls it on, with Tony’s fluid dancer-motions. The now uncovered reactor shines faintly through the black fabric of the shirt.

‘You know what I mean. In California. If I got rid of my boyfriend and you left college.’

‘You didn’t have a boyfriend.’

The Soldier sighs. ‘You would have spent your life with Tony, I know you would have.’

‘I won’t spend my life with anyone. I was raised by an abusive murderer and I can turn into a big green weapon of mass destruction when I let my emotions get out of hand.’

The Soldier frowns. ‘So you would have dumped Tony?’

‘I would –‘ Banner takes a deep breath, he seems almost upset. ‘He wasn’t real. I never really would have met someone like that. They never would have stayed for as long as “Tony” did.’

‘What about me? I’m as dangerous as you are. I can take abuse. I will stay forever.’

‘You don’t want that, Soldier. I don’t know what you do want, but not that. Not me.’

The Soldier wants to touch Banner, but he refrains. His anger seems so fragile, like it is a dam close to breaking. The Soldier does not want to see what is building up behind it. ‘You think you are not desirable, not lovable.’

‘I know –‘ He drags his hand across his face. ‘I’m not saying this in some melancholy “nobody loves me” kind of way; I know there’s people out there who’d love me. But I’d actively try to have no one care about me if I had to. I can’t do this to anyone. I don’t want to, even if it means being alone.’

‘Banner –‘ The Soldier does not know what to say, what to do to make Banner change his mind. He is scared that he will go too far, that Banner will feel violated by his pushing and prodding, by his manipulations, and so he says nothing.

‘I’m going to try and figure out a solution with Cho, okay? And see about getting a surgeon with Natasha.’

The Soldier stays behind in the bathroom, looking at his own hands. He returns to the downstairs bedroom, feeling small and useless. Before he does, he listens by the door to the kitchen, where Banner is speaking to the Widow in his calm, gentle voice. It is a warm voice, a loving voice. A voice that would go to waste if Banner never loved anyone with it.

Again, the Soldier sleeps. He wakes up to hear Banner and Clint’s muted conversation in the living room ten hours later, wakes up once more when Banner checks up on him and brings him a bowl of soup.

He drinks the soup while Banner sits at the end of the bed and talks about the progress, or lack thereof, Cho and him have made on finding chelating medicine that would bond to the palladium in his blood.

The next time he wakes up, the Widow has called again, and has said that she will be there in five hours. And so the Soldier removes himself from the bed. He showers and dresses and goes to the living room where Clint is watching the news. The door to the kitchen is open and Banner is sitting at the table, pouring over sheets of paper with a hand in his hair. The Soldier wants to stand behind him, touch Banner’s hair in Banner’s stead.

The Soldier sits in the armchair and watches the news, which covers petty, local squabbles between politicians, people starving somewhere far away, an American making a speech on the situation in Russia and coming to the conclusion that Russia is a threat.

He must fall asleep at some point, because he wakes up from the sound of the telephone. Clint is the one who answers it.

He listens for a moment, then says, ‘Yeah, good.’ He covers the receiver with a hand to speak to Banner. ‘She’s almost here,’ he says. ‘And she has a doctor with her.’

Banner frowns, eyes still on the notes in front of him, twisting a pencil in his fingers. ‘Where did she get a doctor?’

Clint removes his hand from the receiver. ‘Where did you get a doctor?’

Then he moves it back to relay the Widow’s answer to Banner. ‘Hospital in Glasgow. Apparently he’s a world-renowned surgeon, and he’s a cardiologist, so that’s good for us. She’s holding him at gunpoint. So, um, yeah, if Nat comes in here with her gun pointed at some random guy, that’s our doctor.’

Now, Banner does look up. ‘What’s his name?’

Again, Clint repeats the question to the Widow. ‘Donald Blake,’ he tells Banner, then to the Widow, ‘See you soon, okay? Good luck.’

He ends the call while Banner gets up. He retrieves a pile of read papers from one of the kitchen cabinets where Clint stacked them and rummages through them, the rummaging slowing down once he gets closer to what he’s looking for. His finger traces headlines, then the fine newspaper print, until it stops and he beckons Clint to show him.

‘Donald Blake, surgeon, cardiologist. Part of the team that performed the first pediatric heart transplantation at Colombia Presbyterian Medical Center, New York. That was last week. What is he doing in Glasgow now?’

‘I don’t know. They hold conferences about stuff like that, right?’

‘Yeah. I guess. I think the timing’s kind of weird, though.’

‘I’d say you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’

‘Yeah, right. We’ll see. I didn’t doubt the Soldier’s timing either. I should have. Good things don’t just happen to people out of nowhere like this. Not when they’re this convenient.’

‘But there isn’t – It made sense to question the Soldier coming into your life ‘cause you’d just had the whole Hulk thing happen, you knew that people were after you. There’s no explanation like that for this doctor guy. He can’t know that we need a surgeon, that we’re even in the UK. Nat did her job, she knows he has no ties to anything even remotely related to the Red Room. No ties to the US government or army, either. He doesn’t know that the Soldier exists, he doesn’t know that you exist, let alone that you’re here. He doesn’t know that Nat or I exist. It’s fine. Sometimes things just fall into your lap. And then you make use of those things before it’s too late and your new boyfriend dies of poisoning.’

‘He’s not my –‘

‘I know, I know. But you get my point, right? We can’t afford to be sceptical about this dude. He might be the only one who can save your cyborg guy.’

‘Yeah. I know. I just – he could also make things a lot worse.’

‘Yeah. Well, Nat’s here, I’m here, you’re here, let’s hope that’s enough, all right?’

Banner sighs. ‘Just – thanks, for doing this. All of it.’

‘No problem, kid. I know I’d have liked some help when Nat was going through this. Now go cuddle with him or something. You get grumpy when you’re avoiding him.’

Banner ducks his head, but doesn’t answer.

‘Best case scenario, someone is going to be digging a bunch of metal out of that kid’s chest in the next few days and he’s going to take a long time to make full recovery. Best case scenario. If you need to feel justified in being close to him, I’d say you are.’

Banner still doesn’t answer. The Soldier gets up from the armchair and sits on the couch, where there is more space for Banner to sit beside him. Banner catches the movement and looks up. ‘You’re awake,’ he says. ‘Are you feeling okay?’

The Soldier finds that a strange question and is unsure what answer Banner expects. He nods.

Banner’s shoulders sag in quiet relief and the Soldier assumes his answer was correct. Despite this, Banner does not come closer. He does not sit beside the Soldier like the Soldier so desperately wants.

‘I think there will be fail safes,’ he says. ‘If you try to remove the reactor.’ He thinks he might die, although if he continues on like this, he will also die. He feels weaker, always tired, never hungry, he does not think he would last over two weeks. If he could get his medication back, he would be able to survive, but he does not know where it is, if they still have it at all. It was in the trunk of the car. He was not conscious when they arrived at the cabin, and so he does not know if the medicine was removed from the trunk. He’d have to look for it there, but he does not think they will let him leave the cabin.

So he will have to search the cabin first. He has had missions like these, where he had to find and retrieve something without those with him noticing. He knows he can do it, he will simply have to find the medication fast, without having to look everywhere. The location of the medication, if it was not disposed of and was taken out of the car, depends on who took it out of the car.

He knows that if it was up to Bruce, he would never have discarded the medication. He would likely have kept it close to him, where he could easily find it and give it to the Soldier if he needed it. In his room. Closet or bedside table, is the Soldier’s best guess. But he thinks if Banner had the medication, which he knows counteracts the Soldier’s poisoning, he would have at least suggested giving it to the Soldier to keep him stable.

The Widow might have it instead, and would likely keep it under lock and key. She definitely has a safe somewhere, perhaps multiple safes. It would be placed somewhere that was easy for her to reach, possibly under a bed or in a closet. The difficulty wouldn’t be finding it, but opening it.

Clint seems most likely to have immediately disposed of the medicine, although he also seems most likely to have responsibility over it. He is not as indulgent of the Soldier as Banner is and has been at the cabin while the Widow was not. He would hide it well, some small space under a loose tile or behind a cabinet. It would be hardest to find but easiest to look for without dragging attention towards himself.

He wonders about what will happen after. If he finds the medicine, he will feel better, it will counteract his poisoning. But the poison has been on the loose in his system for almost two weeks now. He will need several days to recover, at least. And several days will be enough for them to try and remove his reactor, to try and end his life.

So he will have to run right away, weak or not, which means he will not be able to do it alone. Only a few days ago he knows he would have been able to persuade Banner to come with him. He would have been able to kiss him and stand close to him and convince him with only a few whispered words. Now he is not sure. He thinks Banner would not want him to die, would go with him even when he takes the medication again, even when it will only make everything harder for Banner. The Soldier still has the money, the five thousand dollars, tucked away in a pair of socks in his room, between the mattress and the headboard. They could go to China. No one would follow them there. There is a small chance Banner might sell him out, but the Soldier will steal Clint’s gun before he even attempts to persuade Banner and if Banner refuses, he will shoot him, then the Widow, then Clint and eventually the doctor. He will have to. He will take his time to recuperate, then flee on his own. It would not be preferable, but it would be his only option.

‘We’ll look for fail safes,’ Banner says, making it sound like a reassurance, a promise.

‘I’m still tired,’ he tells Banner. ‘I will go lie down in my bed.’

He goes downstairs, where he goes into Clint’s room instead of his own. There is not a single place where the carpet comes loose. No false bottoms in drawers or the closet, no hidden spaces behind the closet, the dresser, the headboard or the nightstand, nor in the ceiling. He finds a safe, but it seems to be empty. He finds Clint’s gun and tucks it away between his headboard and his mattress right next to the money. Nothing in the downstairs bathroom. He searches his own room, as well, but finds nothing there, either.

He returns upstairs. ‘Can’t sleep,’ he tells Clint, who is watching TV and gives him a questioning look as he walks by on his way to the bathroom. He knows Banner will hear him in the kitchen. ‘I’ll take a shower.’

He turns on the shower while he searches the upstairs bathroom. Inside the medicine cabinet, one of the tiles in the back comes loose and behind it is a small space in the wall. It’s enough space for a couple of vials and syringes and the Soldier removes them gratefully. He leaves them on the sink, wets his hair under the shower spray and turns off the shower. He towels his hair to semi-dryness and sits on the edge of the bathtub to administer his medication. The ache spreads pleasantly. It makes him feel better than he has felt in all this time without the medicine, and sick at the same time.

He leaves the bathroom with the medicine hidden in the pockets of his pants. He returns downstairs and puts his medicine in another pair of socks and hides it with the gun and the cash. It is only a small supply of medicine, but perhaps Banner will be able to replicate it using Cho’s notes. Otherwise, they will find someone who can.

He goes to sleep, muscles aching the way they should.

When he wakes up, he feels disoriented, but more rested than he did before, less weak. Upstairs, he hears the Widow’s voice and another, deeper one, completely new to him. This is the doctor, the man who will accidentally kill him if he takes the reactor out of his chest.

He will need a moment with Banner alone. This will not be easy now that there are five of them in the house, especially considering how uncomfortable Banner has become around the Soldier in the last few days. But he will be able to make it happen. He will have to if he wants to survive.

He returns upstairs. The Widow is talking to Clint in the living room and they glance up when the Soldier enters.

‘Soldier,’ the Widow says with a nod of her head, and the Soldier feels such anger, such violence towards her. He wants her dead for what she has done, he wants her to suffer and suffer and then he wants her to die. Only he does not remember what for.

He returns her nod with one of his own. Clint smiles. ‘You wanna meet doctor Blake?’

The Soldier nods, because through the kitchen door left ajar, he can hear the low voice, quietly talking to Banner.

He follows Clint into the kitchen. Here, the car keys lie on the counter by the little plastic bottles of pre-ground salt and pepper and the tasteless spice mix Banner has added to every dish he has made. This is the final thing he needs, once he has Banner. That part of the counter is in the corner, by the wall and the window, farther away from the table than most other parts of the room. It would be a strange place to stand. Clint and the Widow, who has silently followed behind him, would notice and be suspicious. His best chance to both have Banner alone and get the car keys is to be alone with Banner in the kitchen. He curses himself for only planning his escape now that they want to remove his reactor. He should have done this when they first took him off the medication, when he was in the cottage alone with Banner and Banner was still malleable and willing.

Now there are three people in the way, and Banner has become less indulgent of him, less trusting.

The doctor introduces himself as Donald Blake and the Soldier shakes his hand and tells him to call him Soldier in return. The doctor does not seem like a real doctor. He looks young, thirty at the very oldest. He is built as if he works out multiple hours a day. There is no possibility that he’d be as advanced as he is at this age, leading the lifestyle he is. His accent is a gentle mix of Norse, Australian and British.

Clint and the Widow seem reluctant to get down to business. They are both well-trained spies, but medicine is a field neither of them has any experience with, and growing up, they never encountered doctors like this, who are friendly and gentle and charge more than little Clint could spend on food for a whole year. They’re overly formal with the doctor, have less of their confidence than they usually do.

It is the doctor himself who asks, ‘is there some place where I can examine you?’

He speaks directly to the Soldier, and so the Soldier answers. ‘Yes. But first I would like to speak to Banner. Alone.’

‘Of course,’ Clint says, giving Banner a meaningful look. He takes the Widow’s hand and they leave the kitchen, the doctor close behind them. He glances at the two of them one last time as he closes the door.

The Soldier turns to Banner, who is standing only three steps away from him. ‘Can I touch you?’

‘No,’ Banner says. ‘I’d rather you don’t.’

‘I’m going to die,’ the Soldier tells him. ‘As soon as he tries to remove the reactor. Even during maintenance, it stays connected to me with a wire. If you cut this wire, a failsafe will kick in. I know it. It will kill me.’

More importantly, it will destroy the reactor, he’ll only be collateral damage.

‘Doctor Blake is gonna examine you first. And the reactor. He’s going to make sure nothing goes wrong.’

‘But he won’t know. Red Room technology is more advanced than anything else. More advanced than pediatric heart transplants. This doctor is out of his depth here.’

‘Then what are you going to do? Die from palladium poisoning?’

‘I’m going to use my medication again. And I am going to leave here.’

‘You’re too weak. And you don’t have enough medication. Clint only kept a couple of vials.’

‘That’s why I need you to come with me.’

‘This is a bad idea, Soldier.’

‘I can be Tony for you. I can take the medication and be Tony again.’ He does not know if that is true. He has had the medication in his system for hours, but Tony is nowhere to be found in his mind.

‘I don’t want that. Look, I get that this is scary as hell, but if Blake can get the reactor out of you, that means you’re safe from palladium poisoning forever. If you start taking the medication again, you’re only safe until it runs out.’

‘We can find someone who makes more.’

‘And go where?’

‘China, India. I still have the money. We can go anywhere.’

‘No, Soldier. Running isn’t going to make anything better.’

‘It will be just you and him. You and Tony. Please.’

‘No.’

‘Bruce, Bruce, please. They’re going to kill me. Even if they won’t mean to. I’m not going to survive this.’

‘You are. I know that you are. Come on, let the doctor check you out. He’ll put you at ease.’

‘Banner, you promised you’d keep me safe. You promised.’

‘This is the safest option. I swear. You’ll be okay.’

‘No. No. This isn’t. I’ve made up my mind, Banner.’ He walks to the corner of the room, where the keys are, and takes them to put them into his pocket. ‘I’ve taken my medication. I’m leaving. If I go without you, I die soon. If you come with, I don’t.’

‘You’ve – you’ve taken it again?’

‘Yes. I’ll kill all of them if I have to. You can choose if you stay or go, but I’m leaving.’

‘Shit, Soldier. When did you take it? When you showered?’

‘Yes. And I have extra, at least for a week. Please. I need you. I don’t want to do this without you.’

‘No, Soldier. We can’t do this.’

‘It’s the only way for me to survive.’

‘It’s not. This doctor –‘

‘Can make things a lot worse. You said it yourself.’

Banner is quiet for a moment, looking at the Soldier with an expression the Soldier can’t decipher.

‘Please, Bruce. I don’t want to do this without you. And I don’t want to die here.’

Still, Banner says nothing, lips pressed together. At length, he sighs and says, ‘Go get your stuff, then. I’ll get mine.’

The Soldier, stupidly, darts forward and kisses Banner on the cheek before Banner can stop him. Then he returns downstairs. His gun, his medicine, his money. He’d bring a change of clothes, but they’d be suspicious if he came upstairs with an entire backpack. He can buy clothes on the way. At the last moment, when he has almost left the room, he returns to his backpack by the bed, half unpacked. He takes out the watch, golden face, brown leather strap, the one he chose, and puts it on his wrist.

He comes back upstairs, preparing an excuse to go outside. Maybe he can act like Banner did in the hotel in London, say that he just wants to go outside one last time.

Banner is standing by the entrance to the living room, comes closer to the Soldier than the Soldier would expect. His fingers brush the Soldier’s back and the Soldier leans towards him, hopes Banner will only pull him closer. He does, coaxing the Soldier into a hug. The Soldier can hear his breathing right next to his ear and Banner starts to say something, something the Soldier forgets as soon as a wet cloth closes over his mouth. Black closes in on his vision. He fights it, clings to Banner and fights to stay awake, but he isn’t stronger than chloroform and feels his body going limp in Banner’s arms, feels other hands, taking him from Banner. Then he feels nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who don't know, but Donald Blake is an alias of Thor's. You kind of need to know that for all of this to make sense xo
> 
> Let me know with a kudo or a comment how you felt about this chapter!


	3. The Hospital

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoy this chapter! Let me know what you think by leaving a comment or a kudo xo
> 
> Warning: This chapter starts during surgery and ends with more surgery, so do read with caution if that's something you might be uncomfortable with
> 
> Also a little reminder: Donald Blake is an alias of Thor's ;)

He dreams. He is in a white room. A man is digging for something in the Soldier’s chest. He curses and mumbles to himself. Somewhere, Banner’s voice, then the Widow’s, both distant, talking about him, saying he can take this. It hurts and then it doesn’t. The man, mouth covered in white, like the Soldier’s muzzle, colors inverted, looks right into the Soldier’s eyes. The Soldier feels caught. He has done something wrong and will be punished. The hole in his chest will be dug deeper and deeper, until it goes straight through. A Red Room technician with the doctor’s covered face puts a hand over his eyes. He still feels the doctor digging. What is he looking for? Why does it not hurt? There is a sound, loud, although it doesn’t hurt his ears. The doctor curses again, hands inside the Soldier’s chest, holding a treasure but unable to pull it out. The Soldier tries to speak, but only the first letter comes out, ‘P – p – p.’ Someone says - someone, woman, red hair, didn’t pull the trigger - someone says, detached, ‘He’s trying to say please.’ Then Banner’s voice, fading away. Then a white light, and the technician puts a hand over his mind as well. The Soldier goes back to sleep.

-

He awakens, but he does not feel awake. He feels foggy, as if drugged heavily. The doctor, Donald Blake, blonde and bulky, mask over his mouth and hair tied back, is leaning over him. His chest feels as though it is filled with big, cold maggots. They crawl around clumsily and when the Soldier tries to look, he sees Blake’s hands hovering over his chest, as if he wants to remove the maggots.

The Soldier thinks he should leave them in. He should only sedate them so that they will stop moving. They won’t do anything wrong. If they stop moving, he won’t even feel them. His chest is always cold.

‘Shit,’ comes another voice. Female voice. The Soldier doesn’t see anyone else, but he knows this voice belongs to someone with red hair, pale skin, eyes that always seem to have a different color, a black suit with a red hourglass on the belt. Didn’t pull the fucking trigger when she fucking had to.

Blake’s head moves to the source of the voice, out of the Soldier’s view. ‘ _That’s_ still not enough? I can’t give him any more.’

‘He can take it. He’s been trained to take worse.’

Blake shakes his head, bun wobbling at the back of his head. ‘What kind of fucking kid is this?’ He steps away from the Soldier, out of sight. He mumbles something under his breath that the Soldier can’t hear.

The Soldier knew someone with a Norse accent once. He slit his throat, ear to ear. The last thing the man ever said to him was where the safe room was, where his son and wife were hidden so that the Soldier could find them and kill them. He should not remember this.

‘You’ve seen what kind of tech he has in his chest. That’s the kind of kid he is,’ she says.

Blake returns to his view, flicking a syringe with a gloved finger. ‘This is the last I’m giving him for six hours, at least. If he wakes up and we’re not done yet, he’s going to have to stay awake.’

A long, high pitched sound, white light, then black, sleep.

-

Only one maggot in his chest, small and cold, on the surface, not as deep as the other ones were. In out, like a needle. But he is usually the one who stitches his wounds. It’s not supposed to be someone else unless he can’t reach the injury, and he can easily reach his chest.

He can hear his own voice as he wakes up, going ‘huh, huh,’ in time with his breathing. Someone puts a hand on his forehead. Massages his temple. Blake is leaning over his chest, one hand pulling back enough for the Soldier to see the curved, stainless steel tweezers he is holding.

‘It’s okay, baby,’ someone murmurs. Woman, red hair, widow. She speaks differently, then, louder, not to him but to Blake. ‘They probably kept him awake for a lot of procedures.’

‘Yeah, that makes it better,’ Blake murmurs lowly. He sounds dangerous. Scary. Like thunder. ‘Crazy Russian mass murderers did it, so it’s okay if I do it, too.’

‘He can take it, is all I’m saying.’

‘Shouldn’t have to. Never should have had to. I feel for this kid. I worked in war torn areas. Never saw anyone tortured even half as badly as this.’

‘There aren’t any war torn areas mentioned in your file.’

‘It was a long time ago. I’d only just finished school.’

A quiet sound, a snip of scissors. The hands leave the Soldier’s head. Blake steps back. When he returns, the Soldier’s chest feels wet and warm.

‘When Banner is awake, tell him I’d like to hear what he thinks of this. He didn’t really say a lot when he was here, did he?’

‘He’s dealing with it a lot better than you’d expect.’

Blake nods. There’s pressure on the Soldier’s chest. In the silence, it is hard to tell how much time passes. A door opens and closes. Blake steps back, but remains partially in the Soldier’s view. 

‘You’re on a lot of anaesthetics,’ he says, looking right at the Soldier. ‘The reactor is still in your chest. You’re taking your medication again, because without it you’d be too weak for us to operate on. We know a lot more about the reactor now. Young Banner and I will find a way to remove it. You’re weakened by the surgery, so you’ll be in bed for a while. Romanoff said you wouldn’t need any anaesthetics during your recovery, but you can always ask for them. You’ll need at least a week of rest before we can operate again. Preferably a lot more. I’m going to have to tell you this again, I’m sure. You’re still pretty out of it.’

The Soldier tries to nod. He does not know if he succeeds.

‘Here, drink some water,’ Blake says. The Soldier feels a straw against his lips and sucks. The water feels good, cold as it goes down.

‘Don’t leave me alone,’ he says. 

‘Of course,’ Blake says. ‘Banner will come here as soon as he wakes up. I won’t leave until he gets here.’

-

Banner arrives while the Soldier has fallen asleep again. He wakes up, and a hand is holding his own. It is warm, almost abnormally so.

‘– eleven different ways to do this. If we anticipate for all of them, we can do this without killing him, most likely,’ Banner is saying. His voice comes from right next to the Soldier’s bedside. He must be the one holding his hand. The Soldier can’t see him, only the white ceiling.

‘Let me see.’ That is Blake’s voice, further away, off to the side.

‘That’s what Natasha, Clint, two friends from Caltech and I could come up with, based on the files Natasha found, the – did she show you? Yeah, well, it’s better than nothing, right? If you can add –‘

Banner’s hand leaves his own. ‘You’re awake,’ Banner says weakly. ‘How are you feeling? Are you in pain?’

The Soldier manages to croak, ‘N – n – o – o,’ and Banner’s hand returns momentarily to squeeze his, then goes away again.

‘You want water?’, he asks. A straw touches his lips and he drinks until the straw is pulled away. 

He clears his throat. His mouth still feels dry and cottony. ‘What did you do?’, he asks.

He hears Blake’s footsteps. He comes into the Soldier’s line of sight at the foot of his bed. ‘I just looked around. We’re trying to figure out how to take the tech out of your chest, but first we had to know how it’s actually in there.’

‘There will be fail safes.’

‘Yes. We are trying to anticipate them. Romanoff is contacting anyone who could know more about this technology. She is going to go to Greece for a few days to interview people face to face.’

‘I want to go with her,’ the Soldier says. She will be able to track down those who worked for the Red Room and lived long enough to retire, but she will not be able to make them talk. Only the Soldier, whom most of them don’t believe exists, whom all fear more than they do the Red Room itself, for the Soldier means certain death, could be enough to have them spill the secrets that are the only thing keeping them alive.

‘You’re too weak.’

‘I heal at an accelerated pace. That is why the anaesthetics lost their effect so quickly. See.’ He lifts his hand to his chest, but only feels bandages, the pull of an IV in his wrist. ‘It itches. It is already healing.’

Blake frowns, but does not say anything. He is cleaning his equipment, the Soldier thinks. He hears him pick up metal things from a metal table and then set them down again.

‘I have had such missions before. All Red Room operatives that survive until retirement know things no one else knows. This is why they cannot be killed. When my handlers needed to know some of this information, they would send me. The operatives would be terrified. They thought I did not exist, I was a ghost story to them. When they saw me, they would cry and beg and piss their pants. They would tell me what I needed to know and I would let them live. They know the Widow. They know what she is capable of, but most of them are prepared for torture and death. They were trained to withstand torture, to face death rather than spill secrets. But none of them can stand fear. And they fear me. They fear only me.’

Blake looks at something beside the Soldier, at Banner, most likely. At length, he nods. ‘If you are healed enough and if Romanoff allows it.’

He knows that the Widow will allow it. He will save her a lot of work.

‘I want to see the files she found,’ he says. He thinks he will be more well-suited to hear what is in them now, now that he is medicated once again.

Blake looks to Banner again. Banner’s hand returns to the Soldier’s, his fingers brushing over the back of the Soldier’s hand, ‘There’s time for that later, okay? If you really want to be healed enough to go with Natasha you should rest now.’

The Soldier nods. The files must be bad, if they don’t want him to see them. But really there should never have been a doubt that the files would be bad. Of course they are. He just wonders in what way they are bad. In the way that he would find bad, or in the way that Banner and Blake, men who have always been free, who have memories of childhood, who are where they are because their own choices and mistakes, who are humans instead of weapons, would.

He turns his hand to grasp Banner’s hand and hold it in his own. Banner tugs once, very gently, and then seemingly gives up. His chair creaks as he makes himself more comfortable. Blake looks at them, smiles slightly and leaves. The Soldier goes to sleep.

-

He feels better when he wakes up, more present inside his own body. His chest aches, but he can tell that it is healing. Two days and he will be more than healthy enough to travel.

Banner is still holding his hand and the Soldier manages to turn his head to look at him. He’s asleep, curled up in the chair on his side, eyes squeezed shut like he’s sleeping with the same stubborn determination he does everything else. It doesn’t look like a restful sleep. His muscles are tense, the corner of his mouth twitches irregularly, his breathing sounds shallow, his hand squeezes the Soldier’s periodically.

It doesn’t take long for him to blink awake, out of breath, eyes flashing around like he has no idea where he is. Eventually he finds the Soldier, looks at him as he pushes himself in a more comfortable position, rolling his shoulders like they’re the only part of his body that hurt.

‘Nightmare?’, the Soldier asks.

Banner nods. He doesn’t elaborate. ‘You really want to go to Greece?’

The Soldier shakes his head, knowing what Banner is asking. ‘I’m sure you’ve hidden my medicine a lot better now. The Widow would have to bring it to Greece, but I cannot best her, not long enough to take it from her. I would die if I ran.’

‘Is that really… If you didn’t have the reactor, and you didn’t have the meds, you were just healthy, wouldn’t die no matter what, would you still stay with us? Or are you only here because it’s your best bet to survive?’

‘I don’t know. I do have the reactor. I do have the medicine. There is no use in pretending otherwise.’ He does not want to think about having to leave Banner.

They are silent for a while. Banner still has not let go of the Soldier’s hand. With his other hand, he pushes a button on the wall behind him, although it seemingly does nothing.

Eventually, the door opens and the Widow, Blake and Clint enter. Banner lets go of the Soldier’s hand.

Blake walks around the Soldier’s bed. He checks his IVs, his blood pressure and his lungs, while the Widow sits in a chair out of his way and Clint remains standing beside her.

‘So,’ she says. ‘Greece.’

‘You know things would be easier if I came,’ he says. ‘Every Red Room operative who knows I exist is terrified of me, whether they believe I’m real or not. In the files you found, it said this, yes, how many of them I killed?’

‘They used drugs,’ Clint says, ‘hormonal treatments, electromagnetic stimulation, all to make you more aggressive. Of course you killed them. That’s what they wanted from you.’

He’s not sure why he says that, why he states redundant facts in such a gentle tone. He pauses, waiting to see if he maybe wants to bring up more unimportant information, but he doesn’t. ‘They will talk within the hour, every one of them. I only need to know where to find them.’

‘I’ve made a list,’ she says. ‘Called a couple of contacts. Most of them don’t know about you, but they know who’s high up enough to be in on something so important. I’ve figured out three of them who are still alive and who are mentioned in the files or wrote some of the reports. One of them lives in Thessaloniki, one in the Pindus mountains. The second one is supposed to know where the third lives.

‘When do you want to leave?’, he asks.

‘As soon as possible. It’s Sunday today. If you aren’t healed by Wednesday, I’ll go on my own.’

‘I could be ready to go tomorrow. Tuesday at the latest, if you want me to be fully healed.’

‘That’s impossible,’ Blake says. ‘Humans don’t heal at this rate.’

‘I do,’ he says.

‘There’s parts about that in his file,’ the Widow says. ‘Pretty sure it’s the same thing that slows down my aging. Accelerated healing.’

Blake shakes his head. ‘That is sorcery. Not something made in a lab.’

‘It is. Most of the stuff on how they did it is redacted, but you can have a crack at it if you want. It’s a little like the super soldier serum they used for Captain America, except, you know, like one of the earlier stages that they tested on black men in the thirties. This wasn’t one formula that was given to him at one point in time, it’s attempts and additions and alterations given to him over multiple years,’ Banner says. Clint frowns. The Soldier knows about Captain America, but he never heard about early testing of the serum on black men. Perhaps neither did Clint.

‘Redress the wound,’ the Soldier says. ‘See for yourself. You can take out the stitches already if you want.’

Blake is quiet as he does as he is told, gently prying off the dressings and cleaning the wound. He looks stunned as he drags sterile cotton doused in rubbing alcohol over the sutures. ‘This is impossible.’ He looks at Banner. ‘Has anyone else been in here? Black hair, dressed in green and black, often rude.’

‘No. No one’s been in here. Do you think there’s a security breach?’

‘No, it is… nothing of import. I don’t believe this,’ he says. ‘I will have to take out the stitches.’

‘And that’s the same thing that Tasha has?’, Clint asks Banner.

Banner looks to the Widow, who shrugs. ‘Pretty much. Though they were a little more… deliberate by the time they used it on me.’

‘So you’re basically a super soldier?’ Clint sounds exited, poking the Widow’s shoulders as if she is not one of the most dangerous people on earth.

‘I guess that’s a way to put it,’ Banner chimes in when the Widow does not answer, indulgent smirk on her face. Soft as she is, she allows Clint to proceed with his poking, even smiling up at him when he’s done. Lets him embrace her from behind.

-

Clint stays behind even after the Widow and Blake have left the room. Banner looks to him and, when Clint gives him a small nod, leaves as well.

Clint sits in the chair Natasha occupied before, shifts it until the Soldier can see him without having to turn his head as much.

‘You know that if you hurt Natasha even a little bit while you guys to Greece, you’re going to die, right?’

‘Do you think you can kill me?’, the Soldier asks. He is genuinely curious. He does not know much about Clint, but he never seemed like one to murder out of vengeance.

‘No, but I know Natasha can.’

The Soldier nods. He knows this, too.

Clint smiles. When he looks like this, in jeans and a T-shirt, cheeks slightly freckled and chin stubbled blonde, the Soldier can imagine a normal life for him, one that does not involve being locked up with an assassin and a monster in a cabin five thousand miles from home.

‘Bruce has been struggling,’ Clint says then, turning serious.

‘But he did not break.’

Clint almost smiles and nods. The Soldier thinks he is proud of Banner. ‘He did Hulk out,’ he says. ‘and this hospital is pretty remote and almost completely out of use, so it’s fine, but he feels guilty about it. He’s been trying to find ways to stop Hulk from appearing again. Most of them involve high dosages of narcotics.’

‘He did not seem to be under influence now.’

‘They have a strange effect on him. He can take a surprising amount of that stuff without seeming like he took any at all. He just gets a little spacey sometimes, so he said he’d stop taking them once we start really operating on you, to make sure he’s fully present for all the thinking that will take.’

‘Has it helped?’

‘He hasn’t Hulked-out again.’

‘But you do not think it helped?’

‘It did.’

‘But you do not like him like this.’

‘No.’

The Soldier nods. ‘He still held my hand, before you came in.’

‘He did?’

‘Yes.’ 

Clint is silent for a while. ‘What happened between you two? Why is Banner no longer sweet on you?’

‘He still is,’ the Soldier says, because this needs to remain true. This is what his life depends on. Banner will not let him die, will not risk the Soldier’s life. But the Soldier understands what Clint wants to say. Banner may still feel the same for him as he did before, but he no longer welcomes it in the same way. He fights it and fights it and fights it. ‘He dreamt I raped him. Because I said the wrong things. I did the wrong things. I wanted to touch him too much.’

‘Did you actually – did anything actually happen, against his will, even just a touch, a kiss? Maybe something that didn’t seem like a bad thing to you?’

‘I don’t know. I know I did the wrong thing, but I don’t know when, I don’t know what.’

‘Have you asked him?’

‘No.’ He does not want to know. He does not want to have to ask. Making a mistake leads to punishment. Not understanding what mistake it was leads to much worse things. ‘I want to see him.’

The corners of Clint’s mouth twist up momentarily. ‘He’s probably waiting outside.’

-

Banner is waiting outside and the Soldier tries to see the difference in him as he enters. He does not notice anything strange, but suddenly every usual behaviour becomes suspect. Banner always bites his lips in stressful times, but does he always do it in this way exactly? Is his gaze always this steady, is he always this calm? Are his hands always so still as he walks?

The Soldier lifts his hand and Banner takes it without acknowledgement, as if ignoring this is what he is choosing to do will make it disappear. He sits in the chair beside the Soldier again.

For a long time, they are silent.

‘What if I die?’, the Soldier asks. He turns to watch Banner’s face, but it stays impassive. He is looking at the door, eyes empty of anything. ‘What would you do?’

Banner still does not look at him, but he scoffs. ‘When people die that means there’s nothing left to do. That’s the whole point.’

‘So you’d do nothing? You’d just go back to Caltech and never think of me again?’

His nostrils flare. ‘Of course not.’

‘So then what would you do?’

‘I’d go someplace remote. Let him take over for a while. He’ll want to.’

‘How does he feel about me?’

‘He wants to protect you. He… if I let him out now and didn’t try to stop him, he’d take you away from here, somewhere no one could find you. He wouldn’t know that that would kill you in the long run.’

The Soldier smiles. He does not usually do this, but he tries to mimic the way Tony did it so many times for so many people. He likes the idea of Hulk wanting to protect him.

‘Would he kill for me?’

‘Of course.’

‘But would you let him?’

Banner does not answer, but his grip tightens around the Soldier’s hand.

-

The Soldier leaves his bed the next day, after he has annoyed Blake into taking out his IVs. He only accepts to do so on the condition that the Soldier eats, so he heads to the hospital kitchen, Blake by his side. Banner is still asleep in the chair by the hospital bed. The Soldier had wanted to wake him, but Blake had told him not to.

Clint is sitting on one of the stainless steel kitchen counters, nodding along to the music from a radio he put on one of the empty shelves overhead. On the counter opposite him he has stalled out all the food he has gathered over the last few days, both things he's brought from the cottage and things he must have bought or stolen from stores out here. He's the only one out of all of them who isn't technically missing or at large, and apparently he has been using that advantage to buy as many different types of cereal as he possibly can.

The Soldier picks out the most nutritional one, knowing that he has gone without proper sustenance for too long. On missions, he has nutrition bars, which keep him healthy enough to perform without him having to waste any time on providing food, but he had already run out of them by the time Banner and him fled from the United States.

He finds milk in an industrial fridge that only holds said milk, chocolate milk and a dozen eggs and pours a measure over his cereal. He holds out the carton to Blake, who is studying the boxes.

'You do not have the Lucky Charms?', he asks.

'Couldn't find them here. The Cookie Crisps are just as sweet, though.'

Blake takes them, although he seems dubious. He pours them into a bowl that's slightly too large for a normal serving of cereal and looks at the Soldier and his carton of milk.

'Cow's milk? Is this for the charms?', he asks.

The Soldier nods and Blake seems delighted as he pours the milk over his cereal and proceeds to taste it. 'This is excellent with cow's milk,' he announces. 'Like a sauce, yes?'

Clint seems amused and smiles at the Soldier, who is unsure of what this means. Blake does not notice, engrossed in his cereal. For a doctor, he sometimes seems very idiotic. So unlike the Soldier's previous technicians, who were either nervous and prone to painful mistakes or cold and just as careless. He never had anyone like Blake, who is careful and refuses to hurt the Soldier even if it is the most efficient option. Even now, the pain in his chest is nothing like how it normally is so shortly after maintenance.

'Where is the Widow,' the Soldier asks.

'Working out, I think. Well, she was working out half an hour ago. On the heli pad. If you follow the arrows to the ER, there's a big elevator there that can take you up to the roof.'

He nods once, then takes his cereal and his spoon and heads to the ER as he eats.

He finds the hospital difficult to navigate, unlike any place he has ever gone to for a mission before. He knows the layouts of hotels and embassy buildings, universities and sprawling American mansions, but hospitals are different, organised in sections, with arrows pointing every which way. There are many identical hallways, with identical hospital rooms and supply closets and staff rooms and waiting rooms, and every part of it smells like a facility, right before the pain starts. He hopes he will never have to be in a hospital again after this. 

Eventually he finds the roof, where the Widow is stretching in the middle of a large letter H. Her arms and legs are spread and she bends sideways to touch her fingers to her knees.

‘You should rest,’ she says. 

‘I have. I will.’

She sits and grabs her feet with her hands, legs stretched before her. ‘Good. We’ll leave tomorrow. Blake will come around eventually. Banner will teach me how to inject your medicine.’

‘Do you have orders for me?’ He feels strange having to ask for it, but he does not know how missions work outside of the Red Room, what is expected from him now.

‘No,’ the Widow says. ‘No one has orders for you anymore. It will take a while getting used to.’

‘What is the mission?’

‘I won’t tell you. You don’t need to know.’

He nods. This is familiar. The weapon only knows what is necessary, not what is redundant.

‘I could go tonight, I’m healed.’ He wants to leave. He wants to be away from Clint’s meddling and Blake’s strangeness and Banner’s rejection. 

She nods, relaxes her position and stands again. ‘If Blake allows it,’ she says. ‘How do you think Banner will feel?’

‘He thinks I want to run away.’

‘Why would you not?’

‘Because he wouldn’t come with me.’

‘Is that real, you aren’t just so sweet to him because it protects you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘At some point, you’re going to have to know. You’re going to have to know a lot of things.’

‘But not now. Now I have to go to Greece with you.’

‘If Blake allows it,’ she says again.

He nods and leaves the same way he came.

-

Their leaving is a quiet affair. Blake examines the Soldier thoroughly before he is even willing to consider letting him go to Greece. He is moody and keeps trying to change people’s minds about letting the Soldier go, first the Widow, then Clint, then the Soldier himself. 

Banner isn’t around as much, and when he is, he’s quiet. The Soldier can tell now, that he is drugged. He is unable to pay attention to anything, to remember what people say and react to it. But he sticks to the Soldier’s side when he is there and even hugs him once or twice, so the Soldier does not mind as much as he should.

That night, while the Widow and Clint have left to steal a car, Banner kisses him on the lips almost chastely. They’re in the kitchen, where the light is low and the air is blissfully cold. ‘Come back,’ he says and it’s like they’re under water, that’s how quiet everything is. ‘Don’t leave me.’

-

The Widow gives the Soldier his medicine in the airport and he sleeps through the entire flight. He is still drowsy and tired when he wakes, his chest throbbing faintly, and he sleeps more in the car. The Widow wakes him up once they have arrived in Thessaloniki, at a run-down apartment building in an even more run-down neighbourhood, where curtains flutter aside as they arrive, but no one comes out onto the street at all.

‘Who is this?’, the Soldier asks. Since the Widow and him have left together, they have switched to Russian almost automatically. ‘Someone I knew?’

‘He worked with you before you had the reactor. I think he might have been there when they put it in.’

The Soldier cannot remember a time when he did not have the reactor stuck in his chest. He does not want to think of it.

‘What is his name?’

‘Konstantin Ilych.’

The Soldier does not remember anyone by this name. ‘Do I go in first?’, he asks, not sure what to do when he has not been given a clear objective.

‘Stay back, let him think I am there alone. I’ve met this man before. I will find out what I can, then you show yourself.’

He nods and stays back as she forces the lock on the front door of the building. They go up mouldy, worn-down stairs. She forces the lock on the apartment door as well. The Soldier stays by the door while the Widow goes further into the apartment. The Soldier can see past the living room, through the kitchen door, a pair of legs of a man sitting down. He is stiff, but he has not gotten up, possibly because he is unable to. A cup of coffee knocks noisily against the table, and dark liquid drips to the floor and down the man’s pant leg, but still he does not get up. He only curses, his voice rough from cigarettes and old age. The Soldier wonders how long ago he knew this man.

A chair scrapes back and the Widow sits down across from the man, where the Soldier can only see her knee through the door. ‘You know why I’m here,’ she says.

‘Of course. Little runaway Widow wants to hear a ghost story. You weren’t exactly quiet about it.’

‘So, are you going to tell me a ghost story?’

‘You don’t want to hear it. I don’t know how sick you have to be to go snooping around at all, but whatever you think I will tell you, whatever you think the American was, it’s worse than that.’

‘I know how bad it is. I read his file. Project A5-LF3CB.’

‘Well, then what do you want to hear from me? I have nothing more to say than that file does.’

‘You do. You knew him.’

‘I _maintained_ it. For two years, that’s all. I never wanted anything to do with it.’

‘And before that?’

‘Before – there was no before. I was there from the beginning. We only had it when it was already almost mature.’

‘You had him for longer. You took care of him since he was twelve.’

‘It was already –‘ he barks a laugh. ‘You mean – you are talking about someone else. The child, he died when he was still young. No one could save him.’

‘You could. You did.’

‘No. Tony was beyond help. He had so many bullets in him he’d have stuck to a magnet.’

‘Did you ever see him, his injuries?’

‘What are you saying, Widow? What purpose does this serve? The child is dead, the American is dead.’

‘Missing.’

‘What?’

‘The American is missing. You are no longer respected enough for them to have told you.’

‘I should shoot you. Some runaway Widow who believes every lie she’s ever been told and thinks I should believe them, too.’

‘Well, why haven’t you shot me?’, she asks, the sweetness of a smile in her voice. There is a silence, then she stands. ‘Sorry,’ she says as she turns her back to the man and walks further into the little kitchen, out of view from the door. ‘I should not be so rude.’ A strange noise startles the Soldier and only when he smells coffee can he relax. She is making him a new cup of coffee, using a noisy little machine. ‘I only want to know about the reactor, the one the American had inside his chest.’

‘I don’t know the first thing about that.’

‘You do. You helped put it there.’

‘I never knew it would end up inside that thing’s chest.’

‘I don’t care. I only want to know how you made it.’

‘I didn’t make it.’

The Widow sighs and sits again. She pushes a mug of coffee across the table. ‘Did you care about Tony?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘Would you have saved him, if you could, if they had given you the chance?’

‘He was beyond saving. That many bullets, he was dead before he hit the ground.’

‘There weren’t any bullets. He got shrapnel in his chest. It tore at his heart, but they put him in cryo before it could kill him, until someone found something that could power a magnet permanently, to keep the shrapnel from killing him.’

‘You are talking about someone else again.’

‘Am I?’

There is a long silence. ‘I don’t know where you got this, little one, but it is not true. It makes no sense. The American killed more people than all you little Widows combined. He killed children, innocents, he never hesitated. Little Tony could not even hurt a mouse.’

‘You know how persuasive the Red Room can be.’

‘I would have recognised him. I would have known my boy.’

‘With the mask? With the wounds?’

‘Do you know where he is? You say the American is missing, do you know where?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he close?’

‘Yes.’

‘You brought him here?’

‘Yes.’

There’s another silence. ‘And you’re sure, that he is Tony?’

‘Yes. Do you want to see him?’

‘No. Not yet.’

The man moves as if to stand, then hesitates. ‘There is vodka in the living room, by the table. Go get it for me, little one. I know he is there somewhere. I want a drink before I see him.’

The Widow comes to retrieve the vodka and then returns to the kitchen to fetch glasses. The Soldier listens to the man’s controlled breathing as the Widow pours the alcohol. They drink and their glasses clack against the table as they put them down.

‘I didn’t make the reactor,’ the man says at length. ‘I helped stabilise the energy source that powered the magnet, but I did not do anything else.’

‘What’s the energy source?’

‘I don’t know. No one did. One of mine found it on a mission in the arctic. I was very possessive of it. It was a strange thing. It had a psychological effect. If you were in the room with it, it could make you so angry, so frustrated. I was happy to be rid of it, once they put it in the American.’

‘How did they do it?’

‘I don’t know the specifics. You know how the Red Room operates. Everyone does one little thing without knowing about anything else.’

‘What happens if it were taken out?’

There is a silence. ‘You can’t,’ the man says, much more quietly. ‘You won’t. It will kill him.’

‘The casing is killing him as well. Palladium poisoning.’

‘Not if he takes his medicine.’

‘He’d rather not take that anymore.’

‘The American has no preferences.’

‘He does last I checked.’

‘No,’ the man says simply. ‘What the Red Room did to him… It wasn’t like it was with you. They were so cruel to him. There is no way to reverse it, to come out of it. If you think he has preferences and feelings, it is because he is pretending. But he does not have them. He is not capable of it.’

‘He is without the medicine.’

‘But he is taking the medicine now, isn’t he? Otherwise he’d be bedbound by now.’

They are both silent for a while.

‘You want to remove the reactor so that he can stop taking the medication. To what purpose? What use do you have for him?’

‘This isn’t about him serving a purpose. This is about giving him a chance to have a life.’

The man makes a sound that could be a laugh. ‘You cannot drink out of a broken glass. You’d only cut your tongue.’

There’s another silence.

‘Do you want to meet him?’, the Widow asks.

‘Yes,’ the man says this time.

The Soldier feels tense as he walks towards the kitchen, knowing that he is expected to come, but not sure if he has to wait for an explicit order. Normally these things are clear. Inside a facility, he is only to react when told to do so, in missions he acts based on orders he was given, but does not need to be directly ordered to do anything. Now he is in between. This is not a mission and this is not a facility. He is standing six yards away from someone who used to be his technician, who used to give him orders, but he is not his technician now.

‘Soldier?’, comes the Widow’s voice.

‘Yes,’ he answers. He can see more of the man through the doorway now that he is closer. He shifts when he hears the Soldier’s voice. His knuckles are white where he grips his glass and he finishes all of it before he looks up.

He does not look familiar to the Soldier, not the weary face and its wrinkled, loose skin and not the hint of the handsome young man he must have been long ago, when he stuck a magnet in the Soldier’s chest.

‘Tony,’ the man says, and again the American name is almost startling from his Russian mouth. ‘Little Tony. They have ruined you so.’

The Soldier is unsure what to do, what to say. He feels as though his tongue is made out of paper. It sticks to the roof of his mouth uncomfortably. When the man reaches for him, he reaches back because this is what he is to do. When he feels the man’s skin against his, his swollen fingers around his own, it feels like holding onto a livewire. His heart beats too fast, like it does when he has been shot, before it slows from the blood loss. His skin feels hot and cold at the same time.

‘Kostya,’ he says, because this is his mission, to convince this man to give him information. He could tell from how the man spoke of his little Tony, the one he confuses with the Soldier, that he was close with the child. Close enough, the Soldier thinks, that the child would not have called him by any formal name. ‘Kostya,’ he repeats. He cannot think of what to say. He cannot think of how to complete the mission. He wants to shoot this man, to stab him, to do anything that will make his heartrate even out again, that will make his ears stop ringing, that will stop the man from saying that name again, _Tony_.

‘They want to remove your reactor,’ the man says. The Soldier steps closer as the man pulls at his hand, until it is resting against the man’s chest.

The Soldier nods. He knows the Widow is watching him, knows that he can do correct and incorrect things, although he is not sure which is which.

‘This will kill you.’

The Soldier shakes his head. ‘Not if you tell them how.’

‘I don’t know how. No one does. Everyone only knows their part.’

‘Tell me your part.’

‘The energy source. It cannot leak. It will kill you if it does. It’s a miracle we ever were able to harness it. I don’t know how they did it. But if the casing breaks, if it leaks, you will die. And if you remove it, you will, too. Because the shrapnel will piece your heart. Here.’ The man finally lets go of him. He holds his hand out to the Widow, who picks up the object he points at from behind her on the kitchen counter. It’s a journal with a pen hooked over the cover. The man tears out a page and sketches with the pen.

He draws a messy kind of circle, jagged lines across it. ‘This is where the shrapnel is.’ He draws a line, curved slightly upwards in the middle, with short, slanted lines. ‘Here is how deep each piece goes.’ By each line on both drawings, he writes numbers, neat little measurements in millimetres. ‘The magnet is so strong, they can’t have shifted much, not even in heavy combat.’

The Widow takes the paper when the man sets down his pen. ‘Do you have any files on this?’

He shakes his head. ‘I am not suicidal, little one. I am only alive because of the knowledge I have in my head, where it cannot be stolen.’

‘What about the energy source? How is it protected?’

‘I have no idea. I never had anything to do with that.’

‘How did you contain it before its casing was made?'

‘Sometimes it cooperated. I don’t know how the mission of my one went, how it happened, but he brought that thing back without ever being hurt by it. Just kept it in his hand the whole way. People have lost their hands trying to touch that thing, but not him. There’s people who tried to experiment on it, all died. We kept it in a room, door locked, that was it. There were people working on the casing non-stop. It accepted some casings but not others. Sometimes it would stay in for days and then suddenly break out. It really seemed to have a mind of its own.’ He is silent for a moment. ‘Once we put the casing in the American’s chest, it never broke out again.’

‘What happens if we try to take out the reactor?’

‘Something, I’m sure. It’s another thing I never worked on, but there must be something. It will be meant both to destroy the energy source itself and everyone trying to take it. Most likely it will be hard to notice at first. By the time you realise, it will already be too late. Tony will die. It is not worth the risk.’

There is a silence. ‘You are visiting Sergeyevich next, yes? Ask him how he lost his finger.’ He is quiet for another moment. ‘Now go, I have arrangements to make.’

The Widow stands and leaves the kitchen. The Soldier means to follow, but the man says that name again, ‘Tony,’ and puts his hand on the Soldier’s upper arm. He still remains seated and his eyes shimmer as he looks up at the Soldier. ‘Had I known it was you, I never would have let you suffer for so long. I would have killed you before anyone could have hurt you.’

The Soldier is unsure of what to say. He covers the man’s hand with his and nods, looking into the man’s shimmery eyes, before gently pushing off his hand and turning to follow the Widow out.

-

In the car, the Widow makes notes in a small journal, the pages warped and worn from use. She carefully tucks the man’s sketch into the journal as well and puts it away again in her bag with their false passports and the Soldier’s medicine.

They do not speak as she drives away. He sleeps through the first part of the drive after the Widow gives him his medicine. When he wakes up, they are already at the base of the mountains. As the altitude rises, the road gets rockier until finally, there is no road left. The Widow parks the car. ‘Yuri Sergeyevich,’ the Widow says. ‘Your handler and primary teacher during at least the first decade of your time as the Winter Soldier.’

They leave the car behind and go on by foot. Half an hour into the hike, the Soldier’s chest is already throbbing painfully, but it will not affect his performance.

This time of year, the sun stays up well into the evening, and by the time they catch sight of the cabin, a wisp of smoke rising from a narrow chimney, dusk has only barely touched the sky.

A man sits on a porch on a weathered chair at the front of the cabin, cutting the bark off short pieces of wood with a small knife, smouldering cigarette between his lips.

As they near, he finishes removing all the bark from the piece of wood he had been holding, throws it into the basket at his feet and picks his cigarette from between his lips. ‘There’s tea inside if you want it,’ he says. ‘Temperature goes down quickly once it gets dark. You kids aren’t dressed for it.’ His voice has been worn away by smoke, and the sound that is left is quiet and deep and not quiet human. He speaks slowly, Russian with a gentle eastern accent.

He puts out his cigarette on the windowsill beside him, takes another piece of wood from a pile on the rickety chair beside him and resumes cutting bark, his movements with the knife fast and precise. ‘There’s chairs inside as well. Come sit with me.’

And so the Soldier and the Widow go inside and each bring back a chair each. They’re mismatched, look handmade. The Widow sets hers between the man and the door, and the Soldier gets it, that there are weapons inside the house she would like to get to before the man does, should it have to come to that. The Soldier sits a little farther away from them, not sure how he feels about this man.

‘I never met you before,’ the man says, seemingly not addressing anyone in particular, although he must be talking to the Widow. ‘Which one are you? There are only twelve still alive. Four that ran away.’ He does not look up from his work, but his gaze is slanted past his piece of wood, at the Widow’s legs. ‘So you’re either Olesya, Yelena, Natalya or Nadezhda.’ He hums approvingly as he looks up at her, almost smiling, something playful in his weathered features. ‘Natalya, then. The one who went to America.’

‘Like my Soldier here, who went to America and wanted to stay there, too.’ He tosses his piece of wood into the basket at his feet and starts on another one, eyes on his work. ‘Wanted to stop taking his medication, be like a person. Didn’t work out for you, did it? Now you’re here to ask me how to take out your heart. But what’s the point? I won’t get anything in return except a target on my back.’ He ponders on that for a moment. ‘On my back, between my eyebrows, on my chest, on my stomach. I don’t think I’m very interested in that.’

‘The target is already there,’ the Soldier says. ‘Whether you help us or not, someone will know we were here. They will not like it.’

The man smiles. His knife stills on the piece of wood, but he does not look up. ‘There was a time I’d punish you for that,’ the man says. He resumes cutting bark. ‘Even though you are right. So what is it you want to know from me? What do you know already? Ilych told you where the shrapnel is. The design of the outer part is in your file. Do you know how to take the inner part out without it killing you? I suppose not. I don’t either. Not very many people do. Not many people alive, especially. I only know what happens when you take it out temporarily. I never did it for longer than thirteen minutes, but I can imagine what happens after.’

The Soldier finds it hard to look up from his hands. He does not remember this, but the body does.

‘The more interesting question is, what are you going to do if this little quest of yours succeeds? If you have your heart out once and for all, if you can stop taking the medicine, what will you do? What purpose does this entire exercise serve?’ There’s a momentary silence, but the man does not seem to expect anyone to fill it. ‘There’s your last mission, yes? The American one, young, dangerous, very promising. Are you doing this for him? So you can pretend to be a person for him? Instead of a weapon.’ The man smiles. ‘Back when I took care of you, you liked being a weapon.

‘But there is no point in dwelling on the past, is there. Evidently, the present is a different story. You want to be with this American? You want to live with him as if you are just like him? As if you are not a weapon and he is not a nuclear bomb waiting to explode? I suppose this is as feasible as staying like this, a weapon dependent on drugs and your blue little heart… There is some poetry to helping you, now that we’re both no longer pawns of the Red Room. You led me to this life, in a way. I’ll lead you to yours.’ He sets down his knife and his piece of wood, half of it still covered in bark, on the windowsill and stands.

He disappears into the cabin. The Soldier can hear him walk around and rummage through cabinets, but the man is very quiet about it. His feet barely make a sound on the aged wooden floor.

The man returns after several minutes and hands a file to the Soldier. ‘This is what the inside of the reactor looks like. It’s not much, but it is better than nothing. Enough to keep you from dying on an operating table. So don’t, yes? Don’t die. Now go. Ustinova lives in Petrograd. The exact street you would think. Number fifty-six. But she travels. She will be in Portugal soon, with her grandchildren. Now go, before that target on my back grows any bigger. I’m curious to see how you go on.’

The Soldier and the Widow get up. ‘How did you lose your finger?’, the Soldier asks.

The man laughs, a hollow sound that echoes through his smoke-riddled throat. ‘Did Ilych tell you to say that?’ The man holds up his left hand, where one finger, his ring finger, is missing. ‘I don’t know if you’ll ever remember, but you might.’ Then he reaches forward, for the Soldier’s left hand, turns it so that the palm points upwards between them. ‘Does it still work?’

The Soldier looks at the man, unsure.

‘You always forget,’ the man says. ‘It was difficult to teach you, because no one knew how it worked, your little heart and its little friend in your palm.’ He peels off the glove and presses it into the Soldier’s right hand. ‘But I know a trick.’ His thumb is digging into the Soldier’s wrist, his fingers cold around the Soldier’s arm, the repulsor pointed up.

‘The body always remembers, even after a wipe. Remember how much it hurts. How it feels when –‘

The Soldier pulls back his hand.

The man laughs. ‘Perhaps there is something worth salvaging in you after all. Now go, follow the spider to your new life.’

-

The walk back is silent. Only when they have entered the car, the Soldier behind the wheel, does the Soldier speak. ‘Where are we going?’

‘To the airport.’

‘To go to Petrograd or to go to Portugal?’

‘Portugal.’

‘The first one kept calling me “Tony”,’ he says next. He feels as though something in his head is not connecting. As though there is a thought being spoken on a radio, but the frequency is not coming through.

‘He did. Do you want to know why?’

‘I don’t know. I think… this is the medication’s doing, yes, that makes me not care?’

‘I think so. When you were off the medication, you did care, right? About who your parents were and who you were before the Red Room.’

‘I wanted to have been nothing, before the Red Room had me. I wanted them to have been the only ones to have given me shape.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I know it does not matter. Whatever I was before them was not this, was not useful. Whatever I was before was nothing, no matter what I was.’

‘So you don’t want to read your file?’

‘I do, but later. When this mission is over. Before Blake removes the reactor.’ He thinks if he reads the file while he still has his medication, he will not be as concerned by what it says.

Then he asks a question he thinks Tony would ask, and he thinks it is curious that here, in a car a thousand miles away from Banner, Tony is the closest to coming back he has ever been. ‘What’s in your file? Who were your parents?’

‘They were too poor to feed me. The Red Room offered them money, promised I would never go hungry with them, that they would give me back once my parents had some more food for me again. I was barely five when they took me. They never gave me back.’

‘Are you sad, that the Red Room had you instead of your parents?’

‘No. There is no point.’

The Soldier nods. He feels as though Tony is sitting next to him, within reach, as though he can fall into him at any moment. ‘Bruce,’ he says, because he thinks it might help, that it might coax Tony into place. ‘I miss Bruce. Do you think he misses me?’

‘He does. I think you shouldn’t underestimate how attached he is to you.’

Neither of them says anything for a while. Tony drives away.

‘That might become a problem after a while,’ the Widow, Natasha, says. ‘It’s been useful so far, but having a literal monster be in love with you is going to become a liability at some point.’

‘Is Clint a liability to you?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

The conversation falls silent. Tony drives back the way they came, knowing where to go from the Soldier, who is much closer than he used to be before, who no longer locks himself up in his mind to make room for Tony. Tony knows now, everything the Soldier knows. He knows that Banner is a target, that the body was tortured for all its life, that the Soldier killed so many people, even if he doesn’t remember them all, that he’s seen people bleed and bleed and bleed. Tony, weak as he is, is terrified by this knowledge, but has no choice to push through, to ignore those thoughts and keep driving.

Natasha sleeps beside him, one hand on the knife hidden along the seam of her pants.

-

Tony takes the medicine on the plane and when the Widow shakes him awake, he is the Soldier again. Portugal is warmer than Greece was, though the weathercaster assures them it won’t stay that way for long. They wander around Lisbon, stopping every now and again so that the Widow can make a call though a payphone.

The Widow’s contacts seemingly know nothing of Ustinova’s whereabouts. They decide to stay for a week, keeping their ear to the ground, and then, if they do not find out any more information, they will leave once more.

The Widow has a contact who works at the airport and so every morning, they receive passenger lists for every flight coming into both the Lisbon and the Faro airport. They even get passenger lists from flights from earlier days. They find a couple of Russian families who arrived in Portugal recently, but none of the names sound familiar to the Widow. On the second day, they receive a call to their hotel room.

The Widow picks up the phone and her face stays impassive as she listens what is said on the other end of the line. She only says ‘noted’ and ends the call.

‘She is going to arrive here tomorrow. She wants to see you the day after. I am not to come along.’

‘Where?’

‘The home where her family is vacationing. It’s north of here, past Nazaré. I will drive up with you, you will go in alone, okay?’

‘Who is she? How did she know me?’

‘She trained you, not necessarily in technique like Sergeyevich, but in ruthlessness. From what I’ve gathered, she mostly worked on making you more violent, making you willing to kill. She’s a lot more of a risk than the other two were. She likely knows more, but she never actually fully cut ties with the Red Room. She retired five years ago, but the Red Room let her.’

He nods. The Soldier is meant for risks, he can take the damage.

‘We’ll prepare for as many worst case scenarios as we can.’

-

Two days later, they drive north until they find a secluded villa with clean orange walls and balconies filled with dark green plants. The Widow parks the car around a bend in the road while the Soldier goes up to the front door. A man dressed in all white opens the door and does not speak as he guides the Soldier through the cool, dark house. He shows the Soldier to an open door, bows his head and leaves. The door leads to a courtyard with a pool in the middle, the sun so bright on the water it’s almost difficult to look at after the shadows of the house. In the shade of the gallery above a woman is seated on a patio chair, dressed in simple clothes that paint a very obvious picture of wealth nonetheless. 

The woman pats the chair beside her. She is sitting in the shade of the gallery above, watching two children play in the pool in the middle of the courtyard. The chair beside her is positioned so that anyone in it would be obscured from the children's view by the wide pillar holding up the gallery. 

He sits. 

'You look good, Soldier,' she says. 'Younger than I expected, after so many years.' 

The Soldier does not react, not sure how to. He knows this woman's voice. He does not remember it, but he knows it, recognises it. Her hands are folded in her lap. He knows those, too, knows what sound his bones make when she snaps them, his ribs pulling back and healing wrong again and again, until she gets tired of the game and aligns them correctly this time. 

He remembers that she would take away his mouth guard, that he would scream until his voice fell away and his tongue was bitten bloody. 

He does not understand, why he has memories of her, knowledge of her, when he did not of anyone else. 

'You want to take out the reactor, yes? I do not think you should. I think you should return. To the Red Room.' 

'They'd dismantle me.' 

'They would not kill you for this. They would only wipe you.’ She licks her lips. 'It would do you good to be wiped. To stay on your medication. These emotions, this insolence, it will only make you unhappy. You will start to want things other people want, but you will not be able to have them. You are not like other people. You are broken and abused. The only place where you can live, where people will accept you and give you purpose, is in the Red Room. This American boy of yours, what are you going to do with him, when he wants sex, when he wants romance? You don't know what that is. You cannot give him that. He will leave you. 

'Soldier, how would you take care of yourself? What job would you do? You do not know what normal people are like. you cannot pretend to be like them.' 

They are quiet for a while. 

'This is unwise,' the woman says, with a kind of finality to it that makes the Soldier feel strange. 

Another silence. 

'I will not return to the Red Room. I will stay with Banner. He will not leave.' 

The woman laughs. 'You are a little fool. You were not made for this world, Soldier. I know this; I made you. I made you to hurt people, to kill them, to torture them. I did not make you for this, to be some, some soft lovesick child. I tore that child out of your chest the first day I was in charge of you. Don't you remember?' 

He remembers the sound of his own ribs cracking. He is unsure of what to say. 

'They will remove the reactor,' he manages. 'If they do not know how, I will die.' 

'You can stop them. You can kill them all.' 

'I cannot kill Banner.' 

'You have seduced him already. If you kill the others, would he not forgive you?' 

'I don't know.' 

'Then you have failed your mission, have you not?’ She pauses. 'You can still salvage it. If you return him to the Red Room, they will punish you, but they will forgive you.' 

'I would go back, but not with him.' 

'I see. You think you love him. You are not capable of it. You had your little dog, remember? Do you remember its name?' She pauses to lick her lips. 'You called it Wolfie. You fed it. You cared for it. It loved you. You thought you loved it, too. Then you shot it. You never mourned it. You forgot it just as quickly.' 

She pauses again, watching him through narrowed eyes. 'Do you remember what breed it was? What its bark sounded like?' 

He shakes his head. He does not like to remember. He does not want to. 

'You killed it in cold blood, Soldier. You never tried to bargain with me. You never tried to refuse. You just killed it. That is who you are. That will always be who you are.' 

Her finger is cold where she touches his chin. 'Look at me,' she says, tilting his head upwards, from where he was looking at his hands in his lap. 'You know what I will say. You know what it will do.' 

He does not move. 

'You are nothing but this, nothing but a clean slate to write orders on.' 

In his lap, she folds his hand over a piece of paper. 'This is how to take out your heart. Now close your eyes.’ 

He closes his eyes. He knows what she is going to say next, but there is nothing to be done. The Widow and him did not prepare for this possibility, because he never told her about the code. He never told anyone but Banner, but now it doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters anymore.

‘Yearning, tarnished, disassembly, first light, sixteen, benevolent, eight, arrival, two, hatchback.

‘Now Soldier. Finish your mission.' 

\- 

The Soldier does not return to himself until later. It is dark. He does not know what day or time it is. 

He feels far away from his body, not sure if he has any control of it yet. 

He is in a car. He is not driving. A woman is. She is composed, but nervous. He does not recognise her. She tells him in Portuguese that they are almost there. 

'Where?', the Soldier manages to ask. 

'The airport. You wanted to go to the airport.' 

Behind them, he hears the sound of sirens, lights flash blue and red in the rear view mirror. 

'You are driving too fast,' someone says. Not the Soldier, the other one, the gone one. Now that he knows the Soldier is there, he fights harder to be in control. 

'Stop the car,' the gone one says. He twists his wrist just enough for the woman to be reminded of the gun in his hand. 

She does. 

He gets out. Even before the police car has fully stopped, the people in it are both dead. The car drives into the ditch between the road and the fields beyond.

He gets back into the woman's car. 'Drive. Follow the regulations.' 

She continues to drive. 

They arrive at the airport. The gone one lifts his gun as soon as the woman has stopped the car. The Soldier wants him to stop, wants to prove Ustinova wrong and not kill anyone anymore, but then the gun goes off and there is nothing left to want. 

There is a flight to London in three hours. The Soldier waits. The gone one steals a passport off of a man who looks like him. 

On the plane, his hands begin to shake. The gone one has never gone without medication before. It becomes harder to hold on to his monopoly over the body. But he stays. Through the whole flight, he stays. Even when he arrives in London, he is still there. Even when he sees Clint. 

'Hi,' Clint says, jogging to catch up with him. He cannot shoot him here. It is too public. 'Nat called to say you'd gone rogue. She was sticking around for you in Portugal. I came here in case you wanted to come finish your mission.' 

'I'm okay,' the gone one says, looking forward instead of at Clint. 'I was scared. Because of what the woman said. I couldn't think anymore. I missed Banner. He helps me think.' 

'What did she say?' 

'That I should go back to the Red Room. That I can only be a weapon, nothing else.' 

'Bullshit. The same could be said about Nat four years ago, now she's doing great.' 

'Yeah. Did you bring a car?' 

'Yep. It's parked in the parking lot. This way. I’m gonna let Nat know you’re okay first, alright?'

There’s a payphone outside the airport, on the way to the parking lot. The call to the Widow is short. Once it is over, they walk to the car. Clint drives. The gone one keeps his hands clenched on his thighs so that they do not shake as much. 

They arrive at the hospital by dawn. They find Blake seated on the couch in a staff lounge on the ground floor, reading a book. He looks up once they enter. 

‘Soldier, good to see you again,' he says. 'Banner is asleep, in the same room where he slept before your operation, close to the operating room.' 

'I'm gonna go find something to eat,' Clint says. He leaves the room. The gone one waits. The operating room, Banner's room and the kitchen they use are all on the first floor. A gunshot here would sound like a slamming door one floor above. Once Clint has gone upstairs, he can act.

Blake frowns when he sees the expression on the Soldier's face. 'What ails you, my friend?' 

The gone one aims his gun. He goes for the heart, which will be quick, and not as messy as a headshot. 

Blake dies quietly, his last breaths coming in quick, surprised huffs. The gone one leaves, on his way to the first floor kitchen. Navigating the hospital is not easy. Finding a staircase takes time, but when he finally finds one. He stops. He hears footsteps behind himself. Perhaps Clint did not go to the first floor after all. 

The gone one turns when the person is already too close, but before he can shoot, his gun cracks, broken in Blake's hand. Blake stands in front of him, back from the dead. It is not right, but apparently, it is possible.

The gone one steps back, reaching for a knife, but there are none on him. Blake has blood on his shirt, and a small hole with burnt edges over his heart, but no wound underneath. 

The ruined gun drops to the ground. Blake takes the gone one's wrists in his hands. The gone one pulls and pulls, but Blake seems unphased. 

'This will be our secret,' Blake says. He ducks his head to meet the gone one’s eyes, but the gone one struggles and struggles, twisting his head and kicking out his legs in an attempt to get away. 'I will not tell the others. You don't have to go through with this. Come.' He stars to walk backwards, and the gone one is forced to follow. He throws his entire weight into trying to fight Blake, but his hands are unyielding. They walk back the way they came, slowly, until Blake takes a different turn that takes them further into the hospital. 

'Why are you so strong?', the gone one asks. 'Why did you not die?' 

'Those are questions for later. What I want to know now is what happened in Portugal.' 

The gone one does not answer. He tries to headbutt Blake, to bite his fingers, to kick him, but nothing phases him. 

Blake pulls him into a room and lifts him onto a hospital bed as if he is weighs nothing. He holds the gone one down with one forearm pressed against his chest while the gone one renews his struggles. 

'Soldier,' he says. 'Please listen to me. You don't have to do this. You can stop. You can stop.' 

'No. I will finish the mission. I will do it.' 

'Soldier, listen to me. Your mission is over. You don't have to fight anymore.' 

The gone one continues to fight. He does not know how long, but eventually, he no longer can. His limbs are shaking, he is dizzy, all of his muscles ache. 

'Soldier,' Blake says, 'are you okay?' 

The gone one, having realised there is nothing left to do, retreats. For a moment, no one is left. 

'No,' the Soldier says at length. Blake is still pressing him down on the bed, although he is no longer moving. 'I killed three people. Maybe more.' 

'How did this happen?' 

'The code - I have a code that - that is like a temporary wipe. When I hear it, I follow any order.' 

'Someone said it?' 

'Yes.' 

'Has it worn off? Will it come back?' 

'Normally it doesn't. I think... it wore off more quickly because I haven't taken my medication in too long.' 

'Oh, of course. Will it get worse if I give you another dosage?' 

'I'm not sure. You should put me under. It's safest.' 

'Are you sure?' 

'Yes.' 

And so Blake leads him upstairs, to the recovery room, where the anaesthesia and medicine drips are still installed, and helps him take off his clothes before he gets into bed. 

'Do you think you will remember this?', Blake asks when the IVs are installed and dripping slowly into him. He can already feel his eyelids growing heavy. 

'Remember what?' He stares at the dark red spot on Blakes chest. 'That I shot you?' 

'Don't worry about it,' Blake says. His fingertips are warm against the Soldier's scalp. The Soldier closes his eyes.

He does not remember what he was supposed to worry about. 

\- 

He wakes up to quiet voices. A warm hand in his own. His dream still has a hold on him. He was in a car and knew with certainty that he had been shot. But when he looked down at himself, he had a red spot on his chest, a hole in his shirt through which he could see that there was no wound underneath. He had the bullet in his hand, but then it turned into something else, a piece of paper.

He pushes himself upright, blinking to adjust to the bright lights of the room. Hands come up to help him. Banner and Blake. The Widow and Clint are standing by the door. 

‘Are you still in pain?’, Clint asks.

‘No,’ the Soldier croaks. He clears his throat. ‘I feel better.’ He does not remember that he was in pain. He does not remember much at all, only the piece of paper from his dream, the one he should have clenched in his fist. He looks down, but his hands are empty.

‘Ustinova gave me a piece of paper,’ he says. ‘I think she did. I’m not sure.’

‘Did you have it on you when you got here?’, the Widow asks.

‘I don’t know.’ He is only wearing his underwear and his gloves anymore. ‘Where are the clothes I was wearing when I arrived?’

‘Here,’ Blake says. He takes them from where they’re folded in a neat pile on the nightstand. He shakes out the pants and searches every pocket, until he does indeed find a piece of paper.

‘What does it say?’, the Soldier asks as Blake unfolds the paper. He wonders if he is acting normal again, whether any of them can tell what happened from his behaviour. Maybe he is trying too hard, to speak gently, to remain calm and in control. He killed three people. They must be able to tell.

‘These are…’ Blake’s eyes flash over the paper, which has more text on it than the Soldier would have expected. ‘This is everything we need. For the operation to succeed. This… could she have been lying?’

‘No.’ There are two options. Either she is lying and has given them the wrong instructions, so that if they follow them, the Soldier will die. The other option is that she is double bluffing them. Knowing that they would distrust her instructions, she has given them the correct ones and knows they will avoid using them at all costs. The first option is more likely. The instructions won’t be entirely mistaken, correct enough to be believable, the mistakes so subtle that no one will notice them until it is too late, until the Soldier is already dying on the operating table. He knows that it is the only way for him to die: by accident. They would not allow him to any other way. They would force him to continue to live with them, despite him being a monster, impossible to fix. 

‘She wasn’t lying. I’m sure of that.’ They will all trust his judgement on this, he knows, even the Widow. He is the only one who met the woman, after all.

‘Okay. Then I guess there’s not much reason to wait, is there? I’ll go over these instructions, compare them with what the other two said and what we thought of so far. Then we’ll get everything ready. I think we could do the operation in two or three days.’

‘The sooner the better,’ the Soldier says. Everyone nods in agreement.

-

They leave to let the Soldier wash himself and get dressed. When he is done and leaves his room, Banner is sitting in a plastic chair down the hallway, reading a book. The Soldier sits down beside him.

Banner looks up and lays his book over his thigh, small smile gracing his face. ‘How are you doing?’, he asks.

The Soldier knows that this is a question normal people receive often. He knows the answer is supposed to be simple. ‘I’m okay,’ he says. ‘I should read the file now.’

Banner’s face becomes more earnest, but he nods.

-

Banner sits by him as he reads the file, beside him in the bed, the headrest propped up all the way. 

It’s a messy little collection of documents, ballpoint pen marks where new information was added, different paper stock, different logo’s, different ink every time his organisation’s management changed. The first file is the one of him, detailing his wipes and his medication and his training, with things redacted in large chunks. This is not information he is supposed to know, and as he flips through it, he feels nothing, no curiosity, no worry, nothing. 

The second file is not on him at all. It is on a boy named Tony Stark, who smiles up from sepia colored pictures, round-cheeked and bright. In one of the pictures, the child sits between a man and a woman who smile just as brightly. They look just like the boy. And they look just like the Soldier, too.

Banner notices his pause and looks up from his own book. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Howard and Maria.’

‘This is false,’ the Soldier says. ‘This is not who I am.’ He touches the little boy’s face on the photo, leaves a smudge on his little smile. ‘This is who I pretended to be. This is not… I am not Tony.’

‘File says you are.’

‘I’m not. I never have been.’

‘Maybe reading the file could be useful anyway,’ Banner says. He is right, of course. Information is useful, always. But the Soldier does not want to know this. 

The Soldier puts the file in Banner’s lap and stands from the bed. ‘It would not be. It would be a waste of time.’ He takes Banner’s book out of his hands. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘I want to try something.’

He pulls Banner down on the floor with him. They sit opposite each other, both with their knees bent and their ankles crossed. ‘Say “Tony”,’ the Soldier says. ‘Talk to him. In Portugal, with the Widow, he came back for a moment.’ This is not the same Tony as the little one from the file. This is an approximation of him, a façade with roughly the same features. 

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Banner says with a grimace.

‘Why not?’

‘Because…’ Banner tilts his head, little crease in his forehead as he frowns. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know why, but it is.’

‘Don’t you want him back?’

‘I don’t know, Soldier. I just want what’s best for you.’

‘Nothing is better or worse for me. I am always the same. With the medication, he is close. Just talk to him. He’ll talk to you, too. I’ll try.’ 

He pauses. 

‘Bruce,’ he says. He feels nothing. ‘Tell me how you are doing. What did you do while I was in Europe with Natasha?’

‘Clint tried teaching me hand to hand combat. Apparently I’m too impatient. I didn’t like it, I didn’t like feeling like I could hurt someone, all on my own, that’s just the Hulk -’ he stops, makes a face. ‘Tony doesn’t know about the Hulk, does he? I’m not supposed to mention him, I’m sorry.’

‘Tony knows everything now,’ the Soldier says. ‘Everything I know. Everything the body knows.’

Banner frowns, but he looks down at his hands in his lap and continues. ‘Then Blake tried teaching me. He has… a very different technique. I’ve never seen anyone move quite like that, not even you. It’s like he learned to fight on another planet. He did kind of… help, I guess. I at least learned a couple of moves from him. Even managed to win against Clint once, although I’m sure he just let me.’

‘Was it scary, fighting against someone?’ Tony seems reluctant, but he creeps closer to the Soldier’s mind, towards Banner’s voice.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t like it. I… don’t want to hurt anyone.’ He glances at the Soldier, trying to think of more things to say. ‘Clint also cooked. He’s really good at it. Said we shouldn’t tell Natasha, or she’d expect him to cook more often. He made pollo alla plancha, which is, um, really tender chicken and beans with peppers and fried onions and rice. It was a lot of work, but it was really good.’

‘Did Clint miss Natasha?’

‘I don’t know. Probably. They’re really close, aren’t they?’

‘I think so. Did you miss me while I was gone?’

‘Yes. Of course I did.’ Banner is quiet for a moment. ‘What was it like, seeing them again, your… seeing the people who hurt you again?’

‘I don’t remember them hurting me. Only the last one. I remember some of the things she did to me.’ The Soldier can imagine Banner knows something about that, about seeing those who hurt you again. ‘When is the last time you saw your dad?’

‘Not long before I met you. I went to visit him. I always tell myself I’ll never go to see him again, but then I end up going back anyway.’

‘What do you talk about with him?’

‘I don’t know. Not much. He always asks me if I take care of mom’s grave, that I make sure there’s fresh flowers and that there aren’t any weeds around it. When he wasn’t in prison, yet, he never even went to the grave, so I don’t get why, but he always asks. He asks for money, too, and he asks me if I sold the house. I buy him cashews from the vending machine and once he’s finished them, I leave.’

The Soldier reaches for Bruce’s hand and Bruce doesn’t pull away. It feels strange, to have Tony so close without him taking over, as if they’re sharing, somehow.

Bruce covers their entangled hands with his own. ‘I should go and help Blake with preparing for your operation.’

The Soldier feels something, something painful that makes his chest clench, at the thought of Banner leaving him. Maybe Tony’s presence is getting to him. ‘No, stay. I want to spend these days with you. What if this is the last –‘

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Okay, I won’t, but I still want you to stay.’

‘I will. Just… I stopped taking the morphine and suddenly it’s like it’s so much harder to keep him down. Like I can’t trust myself to keep him under control anymore.’

Tony lies down on his side, gesturing for Bruce to do the same. He does, lying down to face Tony. ‘You’re him now, aren’t you? Tony.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘You look more relaxed.’ Bruce lifts his hand to touch Tony’s cheek. ‘You look softer. But you… Before, back at Caltech, you didn’t look this old, this haunted.’

‘I know what the Soldier knows, now. He doesn’t remember everything, but I can imagine, how bad it was.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Here. Right here. I don’t know if we are all that different anymore. I don’t know if I still exist. Maybe he just wants me to exist, wants me to keep existing because he thinks you like me, not him.’

‘I like him,’ Bruce says.

‘I know.’

‘He knows, too, right?’

‘He thinks you are angry with him.’

‘I’m not. I was… I was scared of him, of who I thought he could be. But I always… I always wanted to be close to him. I always wanted him to be okay.’

‘Come,’ Tony says and he pushes Bruce onto his back, lays his head on his shoulder. Bruce’s hands aren’t hesitant. One comes to rest on Tony’s back, the other in his hair.

‘Do you think you’re going to be around, after the operation, after he stops taking the medication?’, Bruce asks.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know if it matters. He’s enough for you, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘What if…’ Tony knows what Ustinova said to the Soldier, knows that the Soldier believes her. ‘What if he can’t be normal? What if he can’t be anything other than what they made him?’

Bruce sighs, almost smiling. ‘Do you think I’m any better? I’m never going to be normal, either. When I don’t control my emotions, I turn into a weapon of mass destruction.’

‘Are you still… Do you still think the world would be better off without you?’

Bruce pulls back slightly, as if wanting to look at Tony, but Tony clenches a hand in his shirt and he stays. He chuckles humorlessly. ‘I’m still Hulk, aren’t I?’

‘And before all that happened, you didn’t want to die?’

Bruce’s hands are still, his muscles stiff. ‘We don’t have to talk about this right now.’

‘I want to.’

‘I don’t. I just want to be close to you right now.’

For a while, they’re both silent. Tony, without wanting to, thinks of Howard and Maria, smiling in an old picture with their child. ‘You really think I’m the American child? That they are my family and Tony was my name?’

‘The evidence is pretty convincing.’

‘Tony was a fake.’

‘Yeah. I know. But… I could be wrong, but what if it was a tactic? What if they used that name for missions to alienate you from it? So that if anyone ever tried to tell you really are Tony Stark, you wouldn’t believe them. You’d think they have you confused with someone you were for a mission.’

Tony shakes his head. ‘If I was anyone before the Red Room, they would not have let me keep that. Not even as a tactic.’

‘I know. I know they’ve taken everything from you. But if I were you, I’d still read the file. Even if the boy isn’t you. Just to have the information.’

Tony - the Soldier? Tony? One person by a different name - nods against Banner’s chest. ‘They gave me so much, too,’ he mumbles. It feels necessary, for Banner to know this. ‘You could tell me about the boy.’

‘His name is Tony. He was born in ’37. At twelve years old, in 1949, he supposedly died a car crash along with his parents. They never found his body, but the wreckage of the car was so severely burnt down that even the adults could hardly be identified. His father and his grandfather started a weapons manufacturing company before the war started. By the time the war broke out, Howard was indispensable to the American Military. He worked closely with Captain America, even helping him in one of the largest rescue missions the Captain was involved in. He tutored his son in engineering from an early age. Apparently the boy was very bright. At five years old he could disassemble and assemble any Stark Industries product his father put before him, and they had some of the most innovative weapons of the time. There’s a couple of reels of video of him down at the Smithsonian. Him and his dad, him and Captain America, him taking apart a radio, a machine gun. They’re not being displayed right now, but one of the researchers showed me when I was looking into the files on Steve Rogers. He’s a cute kid. He’s really smart. Doesn’t really sound like a kid at all, when he speaks.’

‘And you think I am that child? That when the Red Room killed an American weapon’s manufacturer, they kidnapped his child and raised it to be an assassin?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Tell me why.’

‘We know from Red Room files that you’re an American. The name Tony Stark is connected to you. It could be just a random name they picked, of course, but we know that at least one person, Ilych, called you Tony before you started taking on missions where that was your alias. You arrived in the Red Room around the same time Tony disappeared and were around the same age as he was when he disappeared. You look similar to the boy and his parents. Similar enough that you could be him.’

‘None of that is definitive proof.’

‘I know. We’d need to test Tony’s DNA against yours to be able to know anything for sure. There’s a professor in New York who specialises in DNA fingerprinting.’

‘Or I’d have to remember.’

‘Or you’d have to remember.’

They’re quiet for a while. ‘We could try finding old Stark tech, see if you can still assemble it.’

‘They could have taught me that in the Red Room.’

‘The guns and the car engines, maybe, but I’m sure Stark Industries made things the Red Room had no use for. There would be no reason for you to be able to disassemble those unless you were taught before you joined the Red Room.’

The Soldier (he no longer likes the idea of being Tony, of belonging to Howard and Maria instead of the Red Room) does not say anything.

‘Or we could go after the Captain America connection. From what I can tell, he basically spent half the time he was off the battlefield with Tony.’

‘But he’s gone.’

Bruce frowns up at the ceiling. ‘He’s not.’

‘He crashed a plane in the Arctic. His body was never found.’

‘It was.’

The Soldier lifts himself off Bruce’s chest to look at him. ‘No. I would know.’

‘They have it at this organisation called SHIELD. Howard Stark helped found it in ‘45, specifically to continue doing what Steve Rogers did during the war and to find him as soon as they possibly could. They found him in ’79.’

‘That’s not possible, Bruce. The Red Room would know this. I would know this.’

Bruce frowns. ‘Maybe you knew but you don’t remember?’

‘No, Bruce, this is not possible. If the Americans had found their Captain again, they would parade him on their TVs and in their newspapers. Every chance they get.’

‘They don’t know how to defrost him without killing him.’

‘They are keeping him in cryo? Like my cryo?’

‘I think so. He was frozen when he went down in the Arctic. They’ve kept him like that all this time.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I researched him. The Army wanted me to – after I finished the bomb, they wanted me to try and recreate the super soldier serum.’

‘But this is not public information, no? How did you find out about all of this?’

Banner shrugs. ‘I had good contacts. Especially at the Smithsonian they know a lot about the Captain. And working for the Army also helped. They gave me access to a lot more information than they would anyone else, hoping that it would help me make the serum. And I guess I found… alternative ways to access anything they didn’t let me see.’

‘You broke in?’ The Soldier remembers that Banner had a couple of theft charges in his file, but most of those were either for technology or food.

‘Sometimes. Not often.’ He doesn’t sound like he feels bad about it.

There’s a long silence, then Bruce speaks again. ‘I’m just trying to think if there’s something we could use, to definitively prove whether or not you were Tony. He knew you until you were seven, that means he wouldn’t really recognise you now, would he, even if you were Tony?’

The Soldier relaxes back against Banner’s chest, only half listening. He enjoys the too-loud rumble of Banner’s voice against his ear, his heartbeat right on top of it. He thinks it does not matter, who he is or who he was, as long as he gets to stay right here with Banner. He does not think anything matters at all.

‘He didn’t have anything of Tony, as far as I know. Not anything he took into the battlefield with him, at least. Would come in handy, since Tony’s DNA could be on it, and it would have been frozen all this time. He had a medallion and a compass with - He had… Did it –‘ Banner moves carefully and the Soldier moves with him, gets up as he gets up.

‘He had a medallion,’ Banner repeats as he walks over to the bed and rifles through the file, past the part that the Soldier got to. ‘They had a replica at the Smithsonian.’ He stops, holds up a picture.

The Soldier takes it from him. Captain America smiles up at him from a black and white picture. He is not in uniform, chest bare and glistening with sweat, something self-conscious about the way he holds his arms, the way he doesn’t quite look into the camera. On his pale skin rests a necklace with a circular pendant, the kind that can open and close.

‘It had a picture of Tony inside,’ Banner says. ‘And, and – I think I remember this right. I think it had a lock of his hair, that Howard sent to him before Tony and him got to Europe. For luck. I think that’s what it said, at the museum. Shit. I don’t know for sure.’

The Soldier just watches him, his beautiful face, the way it morphs into hopefulness and frustration and earnest thinking. The way Banner holds himself like he’s ready to get hit, like he can take it. The way he moves so confidently, yet so carefully, like he is afraid he will damage the air around him if he moves too abruptly.

‘We should ask the others about this,’ he says.

‘Only if you hold my hand.’

-

Bruce holds his hand as they walk around the hospital. They find the Widow in the kitchen. She is sitting on a counter eating an orange and there’s a bowl with more oranges beside her. ‘Clint is showering,’ she says. ‘Blake went for a run.’

‘Soldier was reading the file,’ Banner says. The Soldier wishes Banner would not say ‘Soldier’, that he would call the Soldier by no name at all. ‘And it’s not enough to convince him that he is Tony Stark, which makes sense. There’s no real evidence for it. But there actually might be somewhere.’

He tells her about the medallion. The Widow knows someone who lives in D.C. and calls that person to ask them to go to the Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian, to check for sure that the lock of hair is mentioned anywhere. By three in the afternoon, they get a call to confirm that the exhibit actually says there’s a lock of Tony’s hair in the locket. The next step is to convince Clint and the Widow that SHIELD actually has the Captain’s body in cryo.

Blake believes it surprisingly easily. He only nods earnestly and says. ‘Of course he survived. Steve Rogers was an extraordinary man.’

The Widow and Clint aren’t as easily swayed. Clint apparently works for SHIELD and insists that there’s no way he wouldn’t know about something so big. This is what eventually makes the Widow doubt her own denial.

‘If it was true, there’s no way you would know,’ she says, momentarily distracted from her argument, which was that Steve Rogers could not possibly survive a thirty year cryo, enhanced or not.

‘I would,’ Clint says.

‘What? You think Coulson would tell you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘The way he told you that I worked for the Red Room when you went after me?’

That shuts Clint up, and he’s grumpy and contrary for the rest of the conversation, while the Widow slowly comes around to the idea that the Captain might still be alive and might be kept in a secure SHIELD facility somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.

-

The Soldier reads the rest of Tony Stark’s file because Banner asks him to. He treats it like research for a mission, memorises the details of the child’s short life easily. Tony grew up living either in mansions or on military bases, he was smart and beloved by those who knew him. This seems ridiculous to the Soldier. The child was only twelve. He could not have been much of anything at all. 

After, he reads the files of Maria Stark and Howard Stark, both heavily involved in the war effort and in Howard’s company, Stark Industries. 

For good measure, he also reads Captain America’s file, and although he doesn’t remember ever reading anything about the Captain at all, none of the information is new to him.

Banner is looking into a trip to the US with the Widow and Clint, although they decide fairly quickly that they will have to wait until the Soldier’s operation is done to actually go. Infiltrating a secure base and stealing something from that base’s most guarded parts is a job they could use Blake and the Soldier’s help with, especially since Banner is wanted by the Army and might not be able to come along to the US at all.

-

Blake announces that they’ll be ready for the operation by the next morning. The Soldier wants to stay with Banner, but everyone keeps interrupting their time together. First there’s Clint, when the Soldier is seated in one of the doctor’s lounges with Banner and Banner excuses himself as soon as Clint enters.

‘Hi,’ Clint says, scratching the back of his neck.

The Soldier nods to acknowledge him.

‘You nervous about the operation?’

The Soldier shakes his head. He is eager for it. He wants it to be over.

‘I just wanted, um, I just wanted to tell you that I’m glad to have met you. I really am.’

The Soldier thinks this is a strange thing to say. He has made Clint’s life infinitely more difficult and dangerous. If they had never met, Clint could be in the US now with the man named Coulson, the one he used to call during quiet moments in the cottage. He could be living a normal life in some noisy apartment building with a barbecue on the roof for birthdays and the Fourth of July.

Despite the irrationality of his statement, the Soldier nods at Clint. ‘I am glad, too. You have helped me.’

Then, unexpectedly, Clint burst forward and wraps his arms around the Soldier’s shoulders. This is a hug, the Soldier knows. He is supposed to reciprocate, but he cannot move, muscles stiff. ‘You’re not going to die, okay?’, he breathes.

The Soldier disagrees, but returns Clint’s hug, not sure if he is doing it correctly. He tries to relax and circles Clint’s body with his arms.

Clint only lets go two full minutes later.

-

Once he leaves, Banner does not return to the room. Instead, the Widow opens the door and closes it gently behind herself. The Soldier looks at his own hands instead of at her. He still feels strange about it, about what she did, although he does not remember it.

‘I’ve known you for a long time,’ she says. ‘But you know that, right? Even if you don’t remember.’

He nods and finally looks at her. ‘I trained with you. I know I did.’

‘We had missions together.’

‘You betrayed me.’

‘I made a mistake. I spared a target. You paid for it.’

‘The body remembers that. The pain. It never forgave you.’

For a moment, they are both silent.

‘Is it strange for you, that I don’t remember you? Were we important to one another?’

‘You were my brother. The only person I was allowed to love.’

‘Brother? Because our parent was the same?’

‘Yes. We were raised together. I was the youngest of them. You were even younger.’

‘Were you happy? When you found me in London?’

‘I found you in California. But I waited. Because I knew you didn’t remember. That you were wiped for your mission. I was… I wasn’t happy, but I was relieved. I hadn’t been sure, for a long time, if you were still alive.’

‘I was never allowed to remember you, was I? Not even when we still trained together.’

‘It didn’t matter. We got to know each other again each time. Like we will now.’

Again, the Soldier disagrees but nods. The Widow smiles a small smile, as if smiling is something she prefers to do in moderation, and ruffles his hair.

For a moment, irrationally, he wants to hug her like Clint hugged him, but he resists the urge and she leaves.

-

Finally, Banner returns and sits down beside him again, grabs his hand without worry. ‘It’s been a long time since we’ve kissed, hasn’t it,’ he says.

The Soldier nods.

‘Can I?’, Banner asks. ‘Now.’

The Soldier nods again.

Banner is so gentle, so kind. He lifts his hands to the Soldier’s face, tilts his head so that the Soldier is facing him, kisses him slowly, carefully. The Soldier, selfishly, wants this forever. He wants the kiss, and Banner, and Banner’s gentleness forever. He wants the operation to succeed and for himself to live by Banner’s side, to go with him no matter where he goes, to wait for him when he leaves, to receive his smiles and his kisses and his stories when he returns.

He lets Banner kiss him and kiss him, for hours. Sometimes they stop to talk, or to smile at each other and laugh.

The Soldier enjoys it, but knows that it will end soon, that no matter how much he wants this to be his future, things would never be like this. Banner would want things from him, would want normalcy, and the Soldier would not be able to give it to him, to give him anything at all. The Soldier would know what he’d have in the end, what he’s always had, what he’s started out with: empty hands covered in blood.

When Banner lays them out on a long, comfortable couch, the Soldier pretends to fall asleep against his chest, knowing that tomorrow, he will wake up for the last time.

-

Blake explains the operation to him in the morning, while he is hooking him up to IV drips and monitors and a blood pressure pump.

The Soldier does not pay attention. Blake is following Ustinova’s instructions. Everything will go as it should.

Banner isn’t there yet, although he will help Blake for most of the operation. The Widow and Clint are probably in the kitchen. They won’t be around at all, but will stay close enough should they be needed. Although Blake decided he won’t need a heart transplant due to his healing factor, he does need a replacement for his breast bone, which is gone where the arc reactor is embedded in it, and replacements for his ribs where they will need to be sawed through during the operation. Natasha will bring those transplants when they are needed. Except for that, they will wait and plan the mission to the US to get Captain America’s medallion.

Banner arrives not much later, and then there is no reason to wait. Anaesthetic drips into his veins and Blake has him count down from ten. He gets to one, but then he starts to count down from twenty and only makes it to eighteen.

The last thing he sees is Banner, face earnest, reaching for the Soldier’s face.

-

The Soldier finds it almost pleasant when he wakes up while Blake digs around in his chest. It does not hurt, feels only cold. Banner is standing close, close enough that the Soldier can see him out of the corner of his eye, looking into the hole in the Soldier’s chest. He hands Blake things when Blake asks, even though everything he says sounds distant and garbled to the Soldier, not like language at all. 

His chest feels like a heavy thing rests on it, and as they work, it only gets worse, and warm, so warm the Soldier thinks he is feeling something new, something warmer than anything he has felt before. So warm that he wants it gone. He lifts his arm, which is heavy, and presses his blissfully cold fingers to the messy part of his chest. Banner reaches over him to pull his hand away, fingers warm. He looks angry. Blake snaps at him, Banner snaps back. 

They continue like this, working and speaking in angry tones, no longer as gentle as they were before. The warmth has become unbearable. The Soldier thinks he is going to die. Pain pulls at his molten chest. He hears a scream. Banner and Blake stop and stare at each other across the operating table, so still it is like looking at a photograph. Green ripples across Banner’s skin, but it does not remain. He stays Banner although he is trembling with anger.

Blake breathes deeply. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I will be more careful.’ He looks down, his fingers colder than the Soldier’s skin, so cold it hurts. He is warm now, nothing that isn’t warm can be right. Nothing that isn’t warm can touch him. He tries to bat Blake’s hand away, but it has become harder to move. Banner’s fingers are still wrapped around his wrist.

‘It’s.’ Blake’s voice sounds strange, numb. He frowns, confused. There is a silence, more cold fingers pressing against him. Another scream pierces the air and Banner’s fingers tighten. ‘It’s leaking.’

Banner lets go of him, moves to stand right beside Blake. ‘What?’

‘The stone is leaking. We damaged the reactor casing somehow. Shit.’ He steps back. ‘Bruce, you have to leave the room. Open the container, then leave. Only come back in when I say.’

‘No way. I’m not leaving.’

‘You are. The energy could kill you.’

‘It can’t. A gamma bomb couldn’t kill me.’

‘This is different. Please. If you don’t leave now, Tony will die. Tell Natasha to bring the transplants.’

Banner leaves. As soon as the door closes, Blake bows over the Soldier, eyes flitting to his face before he looks lower. ‘Close your eyes,’ he says. His voice is low, not like a human voice at all.

The Soldier cannot see what Blake does. His face remains one of concentration. There is a sound like that of glass cracking, then light, light everywhere, even when the Soldier closes his eyes. His chest only becomes warmer. He screams. Blake murmurs an apology, but the Soldier cannot stop screaming. He reaches up to grab Blake’s arm, but he cannot pull him away. He raises his left hand, aims the palm at Blake, but even when a white hot beam of energy hits Blake, he does not flinch.

Then the warmth lifts out of him, and the Soldier can see it in Blake’s hand as he steps away, bright and blue, solidifying into a jagged shape until finally, it does not hurt to look at anymore. Blake looks wary as he guides the thing, held almost loosely in his hand, into the container he prepared with Banner and twists it shut.

He looks at the Soldier, who feels as if his entire heart has been removed. His breathing feels fast, but not air seems to reach his lungs. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says as he removes his surgical gloves, which are burnt to shreds. ‘I did not think it would do you such harm.’ He puts on a new pair of gloves and opens to door to the hallway. ‘The transplants!,’ he shouts.

The Soldier’s vision blurs and twin Blakes step towards him and press cold things into his chest. ‘Didn’t want to take it out yet,’ he mumbles. ‘Tony, try to stay with me. Soldier, come on.’

The Soldier shakes his head. He wants to be gone, wants the body to take over and deal with the pain, the stabbing in his right arm, the pressure on his lungs, but the body does not come to take his place.

The world fades in and out of focus, and the Soldier can still hear Blake, but he cannot understand him. Then he also hears Banner and the Widow and Clint.

Then he stands from his bed, surrounded by clean, black walls, and walks down a dark tunnel, and he is alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Tyler, the Creator's Running Out Of Time


End file.
